Historic Prosecution Demands Historic Accountability

Historic prosecutions are now routine.

Allegations reaching back years, sometimes decades, are increasingly relied upon to bring people before the courts. The justification is familiar: time passed does not negate seriousness, and the public interest requires that such claims be examined.

But that logic is applied in only one direction.

When an innocent person is prosecuted on the basis of historic allegations, especially where corroboration is constructed through pattern-based reasoning, the system shows no equivalent willingness to look backwards at how that prosecution came to exist.

Time passed becomes a shield.

Moorov as a method, not a safeguard

In Scotland, Moorov-style reasoning was intended as a protection against coincidence. In practice, it is increasingly used as a method of case construction.

Police investigations are no longer always limited to assessing allegations independently on their own merits. In a growing number of cases, once an initial allegation is made, officers actively trawl the past to locate further complainants in order to assemble a pattern capable of meeting sufficiency.

This is not speculative. It is visible in charging decisions, disclosure material, and case structure. Allegations that could not stand alone are grouped together. Similarities are emphasised. Context, motive, and credibility disputes are minimised once a “course of conduct” narrative is formed.

When corroboration becomes the objective rather than the safeguard, Moorov shifts from protection into substitution.

Multiple weak allegations do not become strong simply because they are numerous. Yet pattern-based reasoning allows precisely that transformation when investigative discipline breaks down.

From allegation to construction

In these cases, prosecutions are not the result of corroboration emerging organically. They are the product of a process designed to manufacture it.

There may be no physical evidence. No contemporaneous complaint. No independent proof. Instead, similarity and volume are relied upon to bridge evidential gaps.

Defence practitioners increasingly report that such cases proceed despite obvious weaknesses, sometimes privately acknowledged as such, yet pushed forward regardless. Once a pattern has been asserted, institutional momentum takes over.

The cost of that momentum is borne almost entirely by the accused.

Victims and scrutiny are not opposites

None of this denies the reality of sexual violence, nor the duty of police to investigate genuine complaints thoroughly and seriously. Real victims deserve protection, dignity, and justice.

But protecting genuine victims does not require tolerating false allegations, nor shielding investigative strategies that prioritise pattern construction over proof.

A system that cannot distinguish between supporting victims and manufacturing cases ultimately undermines both.

The missing symmetry

The central injustice is not simply that historic allegations are prosecuted.

It is that there is no equivalent route to pursue historic false allegations, or to examine police conduct where cases were constructed from no independent proof, relying primarily on Moorov-style reasoning.

If the state can reach back decades to prosecute on the basis of pattern, then justice demands symmetry.

There must be a lawful mechanism to revisit those cases when they collapse, or when serious doubt later emerges, and to pursue accountability for:

• knowingly false allegations
• reckless or incompetent investigation
• failure to test allegations independently
• cases constructed primarily through pattern-based reasoning

At present, that mechanism does not exist.

Time passed is used to justify prosecution, but the same passage of time is invoked to block scrutiny of how the case was created.

That is not balance. It is insulation.

What we are calling for

This is why accused.scot is moving beyond commentary.

We will be launching a petition calling for a clear statutory route to post-case accountability where historic prosecutions were built primarily on Moorov-style pattern construction, without independent proof.

If historic allegations can be pursued, then historic false allegations must be capable of being pursued too.

And where sufficiency was reached primarily through Moorov-style pattern reasoning in the absence of independent supporting evidence, there must be a lawful mechanism for independent scrutiny of how the case was constructed and progressed.

We are not calling for vengeance.

We are calling for symmetry.

A justice system that allows history to be weaponised against the accused, but refuses to revisit historic wrongdoing by investigators or false accusers, cannot credibly claim to be fair.

If the state can reach back to prosecute, it must also be able to reach back to account.

Anything less is a one-way system. And one-way systems produce injustice by design.