Only the victim's word: how the court decides when there is no other evidence
There are criminal proceedings in which the events took place in private, with no witnesses, no cameras, no forensic traces. Only two people know what happened: one says there was an offence and the other denies it. The court then faces the most difficult situation in criminal proceedings: the victim's word against the accused's word. This situation, frequent in sexual assaults, gender-based violence, abuse of minors or harassment, places two fundamental values in tension: the protection of victims and the presumption of innocence of the accused.
The starting point is that the victim's statement constitutes incriminating evidence and may be sufficient to convict even when it is the only element available. If corroboration through other evidence were always required, offences committed in private would be impossible to prosecute, rewarding those who offend without witnesses. But that admission does not oblige the court to automatically believe the victim: their statement is subject to a critical and rational assessment, and if that assessment yields reasonable doubts, the result must be acquittal.
The Supreme Court has built a doctrine based on three pillars of credibility. The first is the absence of spurious motives for falsely accusing: it must be examined whether there is a prior conflict, an economic dispute, a contentious separation or any circumstance that could instrumentalise the accusation. The second is the coherence and plausibility of the account: it must remain stable in its core elements throughout the process and describe physically possible events. The third is persistence in the incrimination, applied with understanding towards offences such as gender-based violence, where retractions due to fear or dependence are frequent.
Peripheral corroboration is not an indispensable requirement, but its presence reinforces the accusation and its absence requires examining the credibility criteria with greater rigour. When the case is reduced strictly to the victim's word, any significant weakness may generate the reasonable doubt that leads to acquittal.
For the accused, the situation can be distressing: they know the events did not happen that way, but they lack objective evidence. The defence must not be passive: although the burden of proof falls on the prosecution, it can examine the testimony for inconsistencies, identify possible spurious motives behind the accusation and take advantage of the absence of corroboration as a weighty argument, when the events, had they occurred, would have left some trace that does not exist.
In these cases, the work of the defence lawyer is more crucial than ever: to meticulously study all the victim's statements, analyse the context of the relationship and argue rigorously why the conditions for conviction are not met, always maintaining the balance between firmness and respect.
If after all this the court does not reach sufficient certainty, it must apply in dubio pro reo and acquit. This acquittal does not declare that the victim lied: only that guilt was not sufficiently established. It is a painful decision for real victims, but also the guarantee that protects the innocent from convictions based on false accusations, a choice of values that is at the heart of the rule of law.
