3 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

I assume it's pretty much universal that teachers are held to higher moral standards viz a viz their pupils than the general public would be.

Usually it is a person being in power, authority, or trust. The nature of the relationship, such as the ages of the people and the relative level of trust are generally considered by the judge.

Teacher/student relationship qualifies.  A camp leader over a camper, a security guard over those being guarded, police over a suspect, a boss over their workers, clergy over parishioners, physician over patients, each have various levels of authority and trust. 

Even if the teacher and student are in a university setting, with the teacher being a graduate student who is doing supervised teaching of incoming freshmen, a relationship between consenting adults of similar ages can still be a concern because of the position of power and authority.

12 hours ago, cowsarenotevil said:

It's not correct that the court "must find her guilty." Nullification has been a tradition in the United States since before the United States. As far as I know, all rulings have affirmed its validity as well.

Maybe its a language gap or difference in jurisdictial systems, but I still do not understand how nullification does invalidate a judges or jurys ruling without somebody going through the process of having the ruling being nullified. As far as I understand it it just means if somebody does not like the judgement being made, he can appeal, and the judgement could get nullified, right?

Or am I misunderstanding how the system works here? Is there some "automatic process" in place that would prevent a judge or jury from ruling in favour of the perpetrator based on the victims testimony? If not, given we are talking about a statistical average, my original point still stands, that a victims testimony can, on average, influence the judgement of the average perpetrator, thus leaving the impression that female perpetrators get treated differently than male ones even though that has more to do with the gender of their victim than their own?

EDIT: Wooopsie, misread the quote, thought the statement was aimed at me... when @cowsarenotevil was quoting bregmas post, not mine. Sorry dude. Next time I'll take more time to also read the quote header.

The judge makes findings of law. The judge interprets the law, rules on the law, and issues judgments based on the law and his own understandings.

The jury (if there is one) makes findings of fact. (If there is no jury then the judge also does this.) Finding of fact means evaluating the evidence and deciding if there was in fact an actual violation or if there was not. When I have served on juries it is mostly about if the thing happened or not, or if the action rose to the level involved.  In one case the law for one charge involved a pattern of behavior, but all we had in evidence was a single instance of behavior, so I argued that was not met. In civil cases there is often a claim of quantum meruit, that's Latin; quantum = smallest unit or step, meruit = earned; in other words, even if the person didn't earn the large financial reward the jury needs to answer if the person earned even the smallest reward.

Jury nullification is where the jury decides that a thing is not a crime or does not apply.  It may happen that a jury may decide even though the people did fight it was reasonable for the situation, thereby nullify a claim about assault even though the assault clearly happened. Or the jury may feel sympathy toward a drug user, and nullify a claim about drug possession even though the act clearly happened.

Usually it is not about the jury sitting in the room declaring "We're going to invoke jury nullification!" Instead typically the jury decides that they don't feel good about a conviction, or decides that even though it looks like the violation happened they don't feel like it rises to the level of the claim, or much more rare, decides the legal claim is wrong or invalid or stupid and votes against it out of principal, which happened several times during racial segregation where juries refused to convict over laws aimed at a minority race. They don't say anything about nullification, they simply return a verdict saying "no" to the claim or "not guilty" to the charge.

Okay, thanks frob, that makes a lot of sense.

I think I misunderstood what @ cowsarenotevil said. Actually I missed that the quote was not from my post, but bregmas. My bad.

So I guess my judgement of the situation with the US court system was more or less right.