No-you should convict if you think the accuser is telling the truth. That is what I said.
You should convict if you believe that the accused commited the act beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm sorry, but I don't trust people that much very often. It becomes a big character test. The prosecuter attempts to build up his witness's integrity and tear down the defendent's, the defense attorney the opposite. The general result is both sides end up drug through the mud.
Let's put it this way: You have a female college student, valedictorian in HS, swearing somebody raped her. Great case, right?
But the guy she says did it is ALSO a college student, valedictorian in HS, and swears he didn't do it(or that it was consensual). Who do you believe?
Let's say she has average grades and does some MJ(comes out in trial). Who do you believe?
For stuff like this - you
need physical evidence, or multiple witnesses. Not necessarily of the act, but events leading up to the proposed incident. Skilled questioning can help, because it has the ability to poke holes in false testimony. But a skilled, but biased, questioner can skew the results the way he or she wants it.
If the guy's already a convicted rapist, it gets a lot easier - but that ties into physical evidence.
Child molestation is another one that's ended up with a fairly large number of false convictions - they've had cases of psychologists, in 'treating' and 'coaxing the details out of' a young child, they end up causing the child to imagine things that didn't happen. It happened with a girl who imagined her father raped her - problem, she was at summer camp in the USA and he was in Europe the summer she ended up saying it happened. The father ended up divorced, in jail, seperated from his family, ostricized, and ultimately ended up commiting suicide over it. It turns out that the psychologist had a huge rate - she had issues with her father and ended up projecting them onto her patients.
Please note that most molestation charges that stick have multiple witnesses over a period of time, or there's physical evidence - video, pictures, physical injuries, etc...