this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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I'm more trying to make sure people don't come by and get the wrong idea about eyewitness testimony or courts in history.
I don't think anyone's claiming that eyewitness testimony is reliable, or that historical courts weren't bad. But it's important not to exaggerate how bad institutions were in the past - it makes it all too easy to dismiss the failures of those same present-day institutions by comparing them to how they bad they used to be.
Yeah but we still get it wrong with only eyewitness testimony. That cannot be enough anymore.
It hasn't ever been enough, though, that's the point. The premise of their intial claim is inherently flawed. Outside of shit like how the US court system treated/treats black people and other show trials like that, there has always been a requirement for a preponderance of evidence. It's one of the cornerstones of common law, and the reason "hearsay" is a legal term of art.
You're not wrong, eyewitness testimony is awful, but we've always known that to some extent. It's why there's all those other types of evidence we also have to use.
Oh dude. I hate to break it to you but courts have always held eyewitness testimony and victim identifications as king. There's people on death row on the strength of a single witness testimony.
Ah for fucks... Okay, new approach: how do you know that? This is one of the most notoriously impenetrable fields humanity has developed, it's really important you be aware of where you're drawing your information from. Have your sources gone into pretrial disclosure, standards for evidence, chain of custody? Or are you drawing the incredibly reasonable conclusion (but in this case, inaccurate in the specifics) that the courts are terrible based off their portrayal in popular media, the news, man-on-the-street, everyone that's interacted with it, etc?
Again, that's pretty damn reasonable, even the idealized representations of the system are garbage. But I'm litigating this point (~~I'm sorry for that one~~) because it's really difficult to improve the system if we focus on the easy conclusions and think that those are what needs addressing, instead of the hard problems for which there is no easy answer. This is one of those situations.
Look through the innocence project case files.
I have - I volunteer with them.
Then I don't why you'd be out here contradicting them.
Contradicting them how? I could take a truly wild guess, but I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere in here and I'm not sure exactly where it is.