… no, it isn't. Really, it isn't. If a poor defendant would have been forced to take a plea deal negotiated by an overworked public defender, yet your friend went to trial with a private attorney, that's an inherent difference.

You didn't change the jury verdict, but you made it so that he went to trial by jury.

Rape is notoriously hard to make stick in a jury trial, but it's damn hard for a public defender not to plead out, there are places where they literally have ten minutes per case.

You took a side. You didn't believe he did it. You said that up top in the post, that you didn't think he should be "lost to the criminal justice system" and that your father covered all his costs of a private attorney for a criminal trial, which would be extremely substantial.

Somewhere around thirty-five percent of rapes are reported at all (Washington Post, 9 Dec 2014), something like twenty-three percent of the total number of reported rapes are prosecuted after being reported, and far less than half of the prosecuted are convicted on anything less than a plea deal.

However, that same article would tell you that false reports of rape are exceedingly rare. They truly are. Most women do not put themselves through that out of spite or bad judgment or some other agenda. They only report because it happened.

So, you went against the numbers because you believed your friend. That's fine, but don't expect your other friend to forgive you for stacking the deck as far in his favor as possible.