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There's a difference between consequences from the state and consequences from private actors. The jail term is just the least-common-denominator solution society has agreed on for punishing his crime. Any private person can also form their own independent opinion of what consequences he should face, and share their opinion.
From the perspective of private actors, it is deeply unfair to expect them to treat someone who has served a sentence for a crime the same as someone who never committed the crime. Clearly the fact that someone committed a crime predicts their future behavior in a Bayesian sense. People should be allowed to use that information to inform how they treat the perpetrator. Imagine the state, for reasons, fines criminals just $1 for committing, say, date rape. This is the right balance of deterrence, justice, incapacitation, and bureaucracy that meets the state's needs. If you're a woman considering having a drink with a man who's paid out $200 in such fines over the past year, you should be allowed to know and to act on the man's criminal history! Your own judgment of the severity of his crime can be wildly different from the state's.
I assume that any competitive male athlete has a higher level of sexual aggression than average, so this article doesn't shift my judgment of him by much. But it's reasonable for other people to get value out of learning this part of his history. It's also reasonable to want to strike fear in the hearts of future statutory rapists to prevent them from acting. So I can't condemn this article; people have a right to know.
In this case, sure. But as a general rule, that doesn't work as well as you imply.
First of all, it's a matter of framing. People are likely to assume that having committed a crime predicts someone's future behavior a lot more than it actually does, particularly if the crime is described in general terms. This won't matter much if it's 19 versus 12 which is pretty bad regardless, but suppose the government lumped together some things of different severity? You're a sex criminal if you have sex with a 12 year old, but you're also a sex criminal if you accidentally expose yourself if there's no bathroom and you try to take a leak behind a building. And all that the general public sees in the criminal history is "sex criminal". The public will treat the latter guy as badly as the former. In theory they could look him up in further detail, say "well, he just took a leak behind a building", and discount their judgment appropriately, but many people will take shortcuts and not do this.
Second, it's a moral hazard if you assume an imperfect justice system. It's true that a conviction predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. It's also true that an accusation without a conviction or any evidence predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. By the same reasoning that applies to convictions, we should pay attention to accusations made without evidence. But the danger of this is obvious: it's a market for lemons situation. You don't know whether the accusation is baseless or not, but the person "selling" the accusation does, and therefore has an incentive to "sell" baseless accusations. An imperfect justice system that occasionally convicts disliked people on a three-felonies-a-day basis will face the same incentives as the person making baseless accusations.
Applying these to Trump's conviction is an exercise for the reader.
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