In April 2012 Ched Evans, a relatively prominent footballer with the English club Sheffield United, was convicted of rape. A fellow footballer, Clayton McDonald, was charged with the same offence under the same set of circumstances, but acquitted. Evans served 30 months in prison, and was released on October 17. Evans has maintained his innocence from the outset, and continues to campaign vigorously to have his conviction overturned. Further details of the case can be found on his website.

Part of Evans’ argument lies in the pernicious nature of the law. According to English rape law it is now the case that a woman who has got herself so drunk that she does not know what she is doing is held to be incapable of giving valid consent, and therefore any man who has sex with a woman in such a condition is guilty of rape and has no defence. The drunken woman has no responsibility for her actions; it is no defence for the man to claim that he was also too drunk to know what he was doing.

The pernicious effect of this law is that a group of people, selected at random from the general public, can be required to decide precisely how drunk a complete stranger was, at a very distant place and time, and on this decison and this alone a man's whole life stands or falls. One is entitled to ask on what conceivable basis - other than some totally arbitrary criteria - any normal person could make such a decision.

This is precisely what happened in the Evans case. The jury was obliged to make its ruling based solely on an asssessment of precisely how drunk the alleged victim had been, in a hotel room, a year previously. The pernicious nature of the law is thrown into sharp relief by the perverse nature of their judgement – of the two accused in the case; they found one guilty and one innocent.

This means very explicitly that they came to the absurd conclusion that the same woman, in the same place, was at one and the same time too drunk to give her consent, and not too drunk to give her consent.

Without even considering some of the worrying facts involved, which can be found in the court papers and on Evans’ website, one might think that the problematic legal circumstances of his conviction would incline any reasonable person to give his protestations of innocence some kind of fair hearing. In fact, the opposite has been the case.

Evans has been widely condemned for his ‘arrogance’ in refusing to express contrition for a crime which he maintains he did not convict. A mob of pitchfork-wielding progressives has determined that they will have their pound of flesh. Departing from their normal principle that every criminal is a victim of society who needs a maximum of understanding and a minimum of punishment, a raft of celebrities have trumpeted the view that Evans’ crime places him beyond redemption, and in particular that he should be prevented from ever playing football again. These include Nick Clegg, the Lib-Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, plus a gaggle of journalists from the ‘liberal’ end of the political spectrum.

Behind them is a much bigger, much uglier mob from the general public. Led by the opinion-formers, and largely ignorant of most of the salient facts and of the legal nuances of the case, they have taken advantage of the ‘freedom of speech’ offered by Britain’s media - and in particular its comment forums - to howl for blood.

So far, so much to be expected. What has become more disturbing is the treatment meted out to those very few public figures who have dared to offer any alternative viewpoint. Among these are two television personalities, Judy Finnigan and Michael Buerk, television presenters on ITV and the BBC respectively.