100% certain eyewitness puts wrong man in prison
wf3h
positive about the identity of the man who raped her:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29613178/
creationist always are saying eyewitness accounts are always reliable
and are needed for an event...doesn't appear to be that
way....scientific evidence is MUCH more reliable.
Lee Jay
Was the person that wrote down the Genesis account of creation an eye-
witness to those events? I think not. So, we have writings by
someone who wasn't there who had no physical evidence of the events,
who was just writing down stories passed down through generations.
Same with the flood. So we have less-than-unreliable to start (less
than eye-witness testimony), with additional layers of unreliability
added (passing stories down over generations), and for desert we have
unreliable translations.
Lee Jay
Devils Advocaat
Ah, but [M]adman will tell you that there were eyewitnesses to the
creation, and I quote here his own words from a previous thread, these
words being in response to a post by wf3h:
"The sons of God are the eyewitness' you freak of nature. The same
'sons of god' that are mentioned IN GENESIS. The same sons of god that
took mortal women as wives are the ones that passed the story on to
mankind. The same sons of god that are in ALL of the ancient history
and folklore in that region. The very same sons of God that were
created BEFORE mankind and created BEFORE the earth. THEY are the ones
that wittnessed the act of creation you utter moron."
And I pointed out:
" The sons of god who took to themselves the daughters of men as wives
could not be preadamic creatures, for one simple reason. It was
mankind that was punished for this wantoness and debauchery."
Which oddly enough elicited no response from [M]adman.
Paul J Gans
>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29613178/
The above story was covered more fully on CBS's "60 Minutes"
last Sunday.
But the kicker is that study after study over the last THIRTY
YEARS has shown that eyewitness testimony is not at all
reliable. Yet the courts continue to accept it without allowing
testimony on its unreliability.
--
--- Paul J. Gans
snex
no they dont. attacks on eyewitness credibility are always allowed in
court.
TomS
<gp68v2$dnc$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Paul J Gans stated..."
There is a strange bias by people to use language borrowed from
the courts in trying to make a convincing argument.
How often do we see someone saying such-and-such is proved "beyond
a reasonable doubt"?
That doesn't mean much to me. A lot of people get convicted beyond
a reasonable doubt when they are innocent.
A certain creationist lawyer has told us that, because he is a lawyer,
he is an expert in logical reasoning.
But that's baloney. As a lawyer, he's an expert in legal reasoning,
or in persuading people who know nothing about the situation. (They
can be disqualified if they do know something - for example how
reliable the witnesses are, or what really did happen.)
In general, the purpose of the law is not to determine the truth,
but to serve justice.
You aren't allowed to use certain testimony in a trial, because it
was unjustly obtained.
After a trial is completed, and the verdict rendered, it can be
difficult (if not impossible) to do it over again just because new
evidence is discovered.
So, maybe there is some good legal reason for valuing eyewitness
testimony, when it seems so obvious that it is unreliable. But it
sure doesn't mean much for determining the truth.
--
---Tom S.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
attributed to Josh Billings
dali_70
some sort of "crime" that the whole class would witness and then ask
the class to give an eyewitness report?
We had a guy run in and steal something from the professors desk, and
then run out.
At first we were all kind of stunned, we didn't know what was
happening. The professor then told us we had just witnessed a crime
and asked us to write out what we had seen, and to describe the perp.
Out the 40 or so people in that class only a few actually gave a
somewhat accurate description of the guy and what happened. It was a
real eye opener on the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.
Descriptions of the guy and what he actually took were all over the
place.
Chris
You know, that has plenty of applicability in any science class. If
you want a good demonstration on the importance of good data recording
(and the danger of the "I'll record it when I get home"), that's it.
(You could also have the class write what they saw, collect the
papers, then have them recreate the account in the last 10 minutes of
class.)
Chris
wf3h
yeah it's amazing the handstands they go through to get their double
standard. science is wrong because an eyewitness is REQUIRED...except
when it's not.
Greg G.
I attended a Michael Shermer talk a couple of weeks ago. He told the
audience to count how many times the people in white shirts passed the
ball to one another. He said that one gender usually does better than
the other. Then he showed the video with three people in white shirts
and three people in black shirts and each team had a basketball they
passed among themselves. I had read of this and knew what to expect.
A person in a gorilla suit walks out into the middle, turns to the
camera and waves, then walks off.
In the original experiment, 50% of the viewers missed the gorilla.
Shermer said that he can get the average up to 70% by giving a
challenge like the gender thing. He said his best was when spoke to a
group of behavioral scientists and told them he expected them to get
the exact count much better than normal. They accused him of showing
a different film the second time.
Knowing there would be a gorilla, so I was amused when he walked out.
That momentarily distracted me from the count and as I refocused on
the ball, I missed the wave until the second viewing.
It just shows how much of the things going on around us that we
actually miss.
Burkhard
Depends what you mean with this. You can of course challenge always
under cross examination the individual witness ("How dark was the
alley? How can you be sure then that ....")
What is more problematic is to adduce expert evidence from cognitive
scientists or psychologists who are experts on the reliability of
eyewitnesses, and who can testify generally on the known problems with
this type of evidence. In the UK and several other commonwealth
jurisdictions, this is generally prohibited, as it is seen as
intruding into the "territory of the jury" - the eyewitness testifies,
the jury decides if he is trustworthy, that is their job. For Canada
see e.g. R. v. McIntosh
In the US, the picture is very mixed. For a long time, following the
relevant UK precedents, it was generally inadmissible.
The leading US case was United States v. Amaral, 488 F. 2d 1148 (9th
Cir. 1973):
“It would not be appropriate to take from the jury their own
determination as to what weight or effect to give to the evidence of
the eye-witness and identifying witnesses and to have that
determination put before them on the basis of the expert witness as
proferred.”
Similar precedents prohibiting eyewitness expert testimony are United
States v. Hall, 165 F.3d 1095, 1107 (7th
Cir. 1999)
"The credibility of eyewitness testimony is generally not an
appropriate subject matter for expert
testimony because it influences a critical function of the jury
determining the credibility of witnesses."), c ert. denied ,
527 U.S. 1029 (1999).
and
McMullen v. Florida, 714 So. 2d 368, 372 (Fla. 1998) "a jury is fully
capable of assessing a witness' ability to perceive and remember,
given the assistance of cross-examination and cautionary instructions,
without the aid of expert testimony."
Now this has changed in some states recently, also because there is
now a much clearer field of empirical research on eyewitness
reliability (people like Amina Memon, Saul M. Kassin, Jonathan
Schooler, Gary Wells etc)
Where states allow it however, it is subject to several restrictions
and some states still rule out eyewitness expert evidence at all
(Pennsylvania and Missouri, i know of)
An important decision was People v. McDonald, 37 Cal. 3d 351 (1984).
The California Supreme Court reversed a conviction because the trial
court had rejected the admissibility of eyewitness expert testimony.
The suspect was convicted of the murder. Seven witnesses identified
McDonald but six alibi witnesses said he was visiting relatives .
The California Supreme Court ruled that to disallow expert testimony
_under these circumstances_ was abuse of discretion:
“When an eyewitness identification of the defendant is a key
element of the prosecution’s case but is not substantially
corroborated by evidence going it independent reliability, and the
defendant offers qualified expert testimony on specific psychological
factors shown by the record that could have affected the accuracy of
the identification but are not likely to be fully known to or
understood by the jury, it will ordinarily be error to exclude that
testimony”
the problem here is "_specific psychological factors shown by the
record_ this is often interpreted that you need first _some_ specific
reason why THIS witness was unreliable before you can introduce
eyewitness expert evidence. What you still can't do is to raise the
issue of the general unreliability of eyewitnesses.
see
Mark S. Brodin, Behavioral Science Evidence in the Age of Daubert:
Reflections of a Skeptic , 73 U . CIN. L. REV.
867, 890-91 (2005);
Edward Stein: The Admissibility of Expert Testimony About Cognitive
Science Research on Eyewitness Identification Law, Probability and
Risk, Vol. 2, pp. 295-303, 2003
Kassin: “On the General Acceptance” Of Eyewitness Testimony Research a
New Survey of the Experts”, American Psychologist, May 2001, Vol. 56,
No. 4, 405-416
Daniel Schuman: “The Impact of Daubert and its Progeny on the
Admissibility of Behavioral and Social Science Evidence” 5 Psych. Pub.
Pol. and L. 3, (1999)
Desertphile
Alas, eyewitnesses and witnesses are probably the worse sources of
facts and evidence one can get.
This part worries me:
"When DNA evidence ultimately proved that another man committed
the rape and Cotton was freed....."
In high school we were taught that isn't how the USA Department of
"Justice" works: if a person is convicted of a crime, later
evidence demonstrating the person is not guilty of the crime does
not automatically free that person from prison--- she or he is
still required to serve the prison sentence because a judge or
jury found the person guilty. Evidence exonerating someone found
guilty of a crime does not free that person from prison: the USA
has no mechanism for finding someone "not guilty after all" and
releasing the person.
The person has to be "pardoned" for the crime she or he did not
commit before she or he can be released.
This cracks me up with mirth:
"... he had sneaked into his girlfriend’s bedroom through a window
and was caught snuggling with the girl by her mother." So he was
snuggling with a girl next to her mother. Kinky.
The whole article is bloody sad and depressing. 11 years taken
from this man.
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz
Desertphile
<wf...@vsswireless.net> wrote:
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29613178/
"Jenniver Thompson-Cannino picked Ronald Cotton (No. 2) out of
this police lineup and sent him to prison for a rape he did not
commit."
Funny.... they all look alike to me.....
Paul J Gans
I'm not talking about attacks on a given "eyewitness". I'm talking
about eyewitness testimony in general. A person can be completely
truthful and honest and *still* be mistaken in the identification
of a person, cars, the sequence of events, etc.
It is especially bad when the victim claims to be able to absolutely
identify someone. Eyewitness testimony is very difficult.
Paul J Gans
Which is why having lawyers "rehearse" one of their witness's
testimony can produce terrible results. If the testimony is
not rehearsed it often contradicts testimony given to Grand
Juries, police officers, etc.
Paul J Gans
Exactly. And those studies (and more complex ones as well) have
been done over and over again for the past 30 years. Just be
careful when you get on a jury because few folks will believe
your story.
[M]adman
Yeah. riiiight!
--
It is all about the truth with:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
·.¸Adman¸.·
^^^^^^^^^^^
J. J. Lodder
Another illustration that memory is constructed, and reconstructed,
Jan
Paul J Gans
>and
>see
Thanks. Excellent post.
The US has some strange legal strictures. Perhaps the best
objective evidence is DNA evidence. Recently a prisoner
wanted a DNA test because, he claimed, it would show that
he was not the perpetrator. There was no DNA test done for
his trial. The state judge ruled that there is no inherent
right to a DNA test.
VoiceOfReason
I saw that clip used over at a BBC site(?), but I think it was to
encourage people to be more aware of motorcycles. Or something.
Mike Dworetsky
news:k9Atl.15508$19....@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
> wf3h wrote:
>> interesing story on MSNBC about a woman who was absolutely 100%
>> positive about the identity of the man who raped her:
>>
>> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29613178/
>>
>> creationist always are saying eyewitness accounts are always reliable
>> and are needed for an event...doesn't appear to be that
>> way....scientific evidence is MUCH more reliable.
>
> Yeah. riiiight!
>
>
Why for once I agree with you! Oh, wait, is that idiotic, sarcastic
drooling from you?
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)
roki...@cox.net
Beats me why they can't put up the statistics in court.
If you go to the article Poole (the rapists) and Cotton (the victim of
injustice) look like siblings. This isn't just some joke about "they
all look alike." Look at the shape of their face, the set of their
eyes and nose. The only basic features that are different in the
photos are the hair length and the size of the mouth.
Ron Okimoto
unrestra...@hotmail.com
> "On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:45:06 +0000 (UTC), in article
>
>
>
>
>
> >wf3h <w...@vsswireless.net> wrote:
> >>interesing story on MSNBC about a woman who was absolutely 100%
> >>positive about the identity of the man who raped her:
>
> >>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29613178/
>
> >>creationist always are saying eyewitness accounts are always reliable
> >>and are needed for an event...doesn't appear to be that
> >>way....scientific evidence is MUCH more reliable.
>
> >The above story was covered more fully on CBS's "60 Minutes"
> >last Sunday.
>
> >But the kicker is that study after study over the last THIRTY
> >YEARS has shown that eyewitness testimony is not at all
> >reliable. Yet the courts continue to accept it without allowing
> >testimony on its unreliability.
>
> There is a strange bias by people to use language borrowed from
> the courts in trying to make a convincing argument.
>
> How often do we see someone saying such-and-such is proved "beyond
> a reasonable doubt"?
But we can never establish anything about reality beyond any doubt
whatsoever. If we want to be absolutely, 1--% sure that we will never
convict an innocent person, we must convict nobody.
And that's not workable, for a number of reasons. "Beyond a reasonable
doubt" is pretty much the standard of science, too, altho scientists
don't usually use those terms. All hyoptheses and theories are
contingent upon continued support from the evidence.
>
> That doesn't mean much to me. A lot of people get convicted beyond
> a reasonable doubt when they are innocent.
Yes. And most often, it's when the doubt is *not beyond reasonable.
Politcally or financially disenfranchised defendents come to mind.
>
> A certain creationist lawyer has told us that, because he is a lawyer,
> he is an expert in logical reasoning.
Actually, he's more likely skilled in rhetoric. Arguing to convince
somebody is different from arguing to determine the truth. But it's
not in a lawyer's interest to admit this.
>
> But that's baloney. As a lawyer, he's an expert in legal reasoning,
> or in persuading people who know nothing about the situation. (They
> can be disqualified if they do know something - for example how
> reliable the witnesses are, or what really did happen.)
As a Creationist, he's also skilled in deceiving himself, so he may
have believed what he told you.
>
> In general, the purpose of the law is not to determine the truth,
> but to serve justice.
Oliver Wendel Holmes (the Supreme Court justice not the poet) said "We
don't do justice here; we do the law". But justice is mostly the
intent of the law, I so I like to think.
>
> You aren't allowed to use certain testimony in a trial, because it
> was unjustly obtained.
Illegally obtained.
>
> After a trial is completed, and the verdict rendered, it can be
> difficult (if not impossible) to do it over again just because new
> evidence is discovered.
Whereas in science, the new evidence is *always considered. This is
the main difference, perhaps?
>
> So, maybe there is some good legal reason for valuing eyewitness
> testimony, when it seems so obvious that it is unreliable. But it
> sure doesn't mean much for determining the truth.
Often it's all we have for a crime. Better than trial by combat, I
suppose.
>
> --
> ---Tom S.
> "As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
> attributed to Josh Billings
Kermit
TomS
<e3c55bfc-f259-48f4...@e18g2000yqo.googlegroups.com>,
unrestra...@hotmail.com stated..."
>
>On Mar 10, 11:16=A0am, TomS <TomS_mem...@newsguy.com> wrote:
[...snip...]
>Oliver Wendel Holmes (the Supreme Court justice not the poet) said "We
>don't do justice here; we do the law". But justice is mostly the
>intent of the law, I so I like to think.
And he also wrote: "The life of the law has not been logic, it
has been experience." (From "The Common Law", as I recall.) I
understand that Our Favorite Lawyer doesn't care much for Holmes.
>
>>
>> You aren't allowed to use certain testimony in a trial, because it
>> was unjustly obtained.
>
>Illegally obtained.
Some people object to evidence being discarded merely because it was
illegally obtained.
>
>>
>> After a trial is completed, and the verdict rendered, it can be
>> difficult (if not impossible) to do it over again just because new
>> evidence is discovered.
>
>Whereas in science, the new evidence is *always considered. This is
>the main difference, perhaps?
>
>>
>> So, maybe there is some good legal reason for valuing eyewitness
>> testimony, when it seems so obvious that it is unreliable. But it
>> sure doesn't mean much for determining the truth.
>
>Often it's all we have for a crime. Better than trial by combat, I
>suppose.
I was thinking of inquisitional trial.
Whatever it takes to get to the truth. Of course, in practice,
there were some problems exposed which led to it getting a bad
reputation.
There are good reasons, IMHO, that the law does not have the truth
as the primary goal.
Walter Bushell
Ouch. Probably because it would render too many cases unwinable.
Walter Bushell
Paul J Gans <ga...@panix.com> wrote:
> Which is why having lawyers "rehearse" one of their witness's
> testimony can produce terrible results. If the testimony is
> not rehearsed it often contradicts testimony given to Grand
> Juries, police officers, etc.
And the more the witness repeats the story the more firmly they believe
it and the more credible their testimony becomes. If a witness
misidentifies the culprit, every time the witness picks the guy out of a
crowd the more the wrong person gets identified as the real culprit.
Walter Bushell
TomS <TomS_...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> Some people object to evidence being discarded merely because it was
> illegally obtained.
It's bad, no doubt, but it is better than allowing law enforcement carte
blanch to disregard privacy completely, which they would do, because
they have always be immune from prosecution for constitutional
violations of privacy. It takes outright malicious prosecution to get a
prosecutor removed and not always even that.
Walter Bushell
<b3c42ed4-2484-4d2d...@q11g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
roki...@cox.net wrote:
> Beats me why they can't put up the statistics in court.
>
> If you go to the article Poole (the rapists) and Cotton (the victim of
> injustice) look like siblings. This isn't just some joke about "they
> all look alike." Look at the shape of their face, the set of their
> eyes and nose. The only basic features that are different in the
> photos are the hair length and the size of the mouth.
>
> Ron Okimoto
And after repeating the testimony many times the victim will remember
the wrong face even if they weren't much alike to begin with.
Walter Bushell
Just because we become more convinced of our memories after frequently
recalling them does not mean they are accurate. Every recollection is
modified and written out again.
John S. Wilkins
I think it's because courts were established before forensic medicine
and science, and so they ued the best thing they had, in contexts where
there were far fewer individuals who *might* have been identified that
way. Eyewitness testimony was not designed for societies of 30 million,
but towns of 10,000 or less, or where large cities were divided into
smaller neighbourhoods.
Once established it is entrenched into the legal modus operandi. Hard to
remove without doing harm to other aspects of jurisprudence. It will
evolve over time.
--
John S. Wilkins, Philosophy, University of Sydney
scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre
J. J. Lodder
Those societies also had laws against bearing false witness
that would be considered very harsh by modern standards.
I don't know how harsh, perhaps you might even be hanged for it.
harsh enough anyway to make a winess think twice,
Jan
Matt Silberstein
<TomS_...@newsguy.com> in
<246875954.000...@drn.newsguy.com> wrote:
[snip]
>Some people object to evidence being discarded merely because it was
>illegally obtained.
>
If and when courts are willing to put cops in jail for illegally
obtaining evidence or, at a bare minimum, firing them for the illegal
act, then there is no other reasonable remedy available but to deny
the use of the evidence.
[snip]
--
Matt Silberstein
Do something today about the Darfur Genocide
http://www.beawitness.org
http://www.darfurgenocide.org
http://www.savedarfur.org
"Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop"
Vend
I also saw it.
The speaker told us to count how many times a specific person passed
the ball.
Most people, including me, missed the gorilla.
The speaker explained the phenomenon as the eyes having good visual
acuity only near the center of the field of view, and the brain
integrating the data sent by the moving eyes in a 'mental picture'.
TomS
<1iwz0rx.mg...@de-ster.xs4all.nl>, J. J. Lodder stated..."
I'll suggest that almost as unreliable as eyewitness testimony is
confession.
How many people falsely confess to crimes? There is the folklore
that whenever there is a infamous crime, the police get many people
volunteering confessions. There are legal methods that police use to
get people to believe that they are guilty. And there are plea
bargains. Not to mention various unethical means to get confessions.
Vend
> In article <246875954.0000eca7.042.0...@drn.newsguy.com>,
>
> TomS <TomS_mem...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> > Some people object to evidence being discarded merely because it was
> > illegally obtained.
>
> It's bad, no doubt, but it is better than allowing law enforcement carte
> blanch to disregard privacy completely, which they would do, because
> they have always be immune from prosecution for constitutional
> violations of privacy. It takes outright malicious prosecution to get a
> prosecutor removed and not always even that.
Prosecutors who obtain evidence illegally could (and should, IMHO)
face punishment.
But that shouldn't be a good reason for discarding evidence, unless
its reliability becomes questionable.
Walter Bushell
nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) wrote:
The point is though that the witnesses are "absolutely" convinced that
they are right. And the police have ways of getting you to identify the
wrong person, with out either the police or you knowing it.
Remember what we think of as direct perception of reality is in fact a
dream guided by sensory input.
Rho, rho, rho your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily
All is your[1] own dream.
[1] "my" may be substituted for "your" here.
Walter Bushell
Matt Silberstein <RemoveThisPref...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> If and when courts are willing to put cops in jail for illegally
> obtaining evidence or, at a bare minimum, firing them for the illegal
> act, then there is no other reasonable remedy available but to deny
> the use of the evidence.
>
> [snip]
We would also need prosecutors would would indite and fairly try the
cops, and that is also not going to happen. For one thing, the
prosecutors need the police as allies, and are not in a position to
antagonize them.
Walter Bushell
TomS <TomS_...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> I'll suggest that almost as unreliable as eyewitness testimony is
> confession.
>
> How many people falsely confess to crimes? There is the folklore
> that whenever there is a infamous crime, the police get many people
> volunteering confessions. There are legal methods that police use to
> get people to believe that they are guilty. And there are plea
> bargains. Not to mention various unethical means to get confessions.
>
A lot of the legal methods are also unethical. Sleep depravation can get
anyone to confess to anything, it's just slower than waterboarding.
Walter Bushell
<0f12a1dd-5d60-4df9...@y9g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>,
Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
> On 22 Mar, 00:42, Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> wrote:
> > In article <246875954.0000eca7.042.0...@drn.newsguy.com>,
> >
> > TomS <TomS_mem...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> > > Some people object to evidence being discarded merely because it was
> > > illegally obtained.
> >
> > It's bad, no doubt, but it is better than allowing law enforcement carte
> > blanch to disregard privacy completely, which they would do, because
> > they have always be immune from prosecution for constitutional
> > violations of privacy. It takes outright malicious prosecution to get a
> > prosecutor removed and not always even that.
>
> Prosecutors who obtain evidence illegally could (and should, IMHO)
> face punishment.
That is unworkable.
> But that shouldn't be a good reason for discarding evidence, unless
> its reliability becomes questionable.
Just tear up the right to privacy in the Constitution then, because that
is the only thing that prevents law enforcement from doing that.
Walter Bushell
<e76d1c83-3bd5-4402...@a39g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote:
> I also saw it.
> The speaker told us to count how many times a specific person passed
> the ball.
> Most people, including me, missed the gorilla.
> The speaker explained the phenomenon as the eyes having good visual
> acuity only near the center of the field of view, and the brain
> integrating the data sent by the moving eyes in a 'mental picture'.
As I said, but bears repeating, our perception of reality is a sense
organ guided dream.
Burkhard
> Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> wrote:
> > Paul J Gans <g...@panix.com> wrote:
I think it is a bit more complicated than that. With evidence,
information content is unfortunately inversely correlated to
reliability DNA is more accurate than fingerprints, but tells you
less. It only establishes a match between two samples, but since DNA
is easily transferable, it tells you nothing about how it got there.
The suspect's DNA on a knife does not mean he ever handled it.
Especially with LCN DNA, it;s enough that he coughed on it when it was
on display in the shop. Fingerprints are much less accurate than DNA,
but tell you a bit more. A suspect's fingerprint on the knife tells
you that he almost certainly handled it (there are some stories about
third party transfer/planted fingerprints, but it is very difficult)
but it does not tell you if he used to for stabbing, or pulled it out
in a first aid attempt. Only an eyewitness can really tell you if the
behaviour in question matches the description in the criminal law, but
they are the least reliable. So ideally you want an eyewitness account
corroborated by forensic evidence.
Burkhard
Most exclusionary rules have a double function: they discipline the
police, but also contribute to reliability. Warrant requirements for
instance make it much more difficult to plant evidence.
Paul J Gans
>I'll suggest that almost as unreliable as eyewitness testimony is
>confession.
>How many people falsely confess to crimes? There is the folklore
>that whenever there is a infamous crime, the police get many people
>volunteering confessions. There are legal methods that police use to
>get people to believe that they are guilty. And there are plea
>bargains. Not to mention various unethical means to get confessions.
"Legal" here is also a bit of a problem. When you are questioned
for 18 hours non-stop you in fact might not be in full possession
of your senses. Especially if hungry and needing a bathroom to
which you have not been allowed to go often enough.
And yet in most jurisdictions this is perfectl legal.
In my opinion what needs to be added to the list of things
needing to be done is to film each and every interaction the
cops and the ADA's have with the accused. If the jury had
to sit through an 18 hour interrogation (even broken over several
days) they might have a different view of the "confession".
But courts will not "waste the jury's time" with such nonsense.
Vend
> In article <uldcs45klmcndh3fttn9qtjut44fihc...@4ax.com>,
> Matt Silberstein <RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nos...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> > If and when courts are willing to put cops in jail for illegally
> > obtaining evidence or, at a bare minimum, firing them for the illegal
> > act, then there is no other reasonable remedy available but to deny
> > the use of the evidence.
>
> > [snip]
>
> We would also need prosecutors would would indite and fairly try the
> cops, and that is also not going to happen. For one thing, the
> prosecutors need the police as allies, and are not in a position to
> antagonize them.
As soon as it is determined that a piece of evidence has been obtained
illegally there could be an automatic punishment for the cops who
obtained it.
J. J. Lodder
Nevertheless, knowledge that you may get hanged (or even whipped)
for being wrong will make a lot of those
'absolutely convinced' witnesses a lot less convinced.
> Remember what we think of as direct perception of reality is in fact a
> dream guided by sensory input.
I said already that memory is constructed,
reconstructed even, and reconstructed again,
and again,
Jan
Matt Silberstein
<ven...@virgilio.it> in
<0f12a1dd-5d60-4df9...@y9g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>
wrote:
You need some way to stop police from violating the 4th and 5th
amendments. So either they face a race likely significant personal
punishment for their actions, which will never happen, or you have to
sanction the prosecution in general. So we exclude the evidence as a
way to tell the cops it is not worth violating the law.
Matt Silberstein
<TomS_...@newsguy.com> in
<247729092.000...@drn.newsguy.com> wrote:
[snip]
>I'll suggest that almost as unreliable as eyewitness testimony is
>confession.
>
>How many people falsely confess to crimes? There is the folklore
>that whenever there is a infamous crime, the police get many people
>volunteering confessions. There are legal methods that police use to
>get people to believe that they are guilty. And there are plea
>bargains. Not to mention various unethical means to get confessions.
Almost all of the people released due to DNA evidence confessed to the
crime. Confessions should be excluded unless they are in open court.
That is the treason standard and it is a good one.
Paul J Gans
Won't work. Sometimes cops are given wrong search warrants. They
do their job, but ...
Vend
Then punish who issued the wrong search warrant.
Louann Miller
094b14...@p11g2000yqe.googlegroups.com:
>> >As soon as it is determined that a piece of evidence has been obtained
>> >illegally there could be an automatic punishment for the cops who
>> >obtained it.
>>
>> Won't work. ĸSometimes cops are given wrong search warrants. ĸThey
>> do their job, but ...
>
> Then punish who issued the wrong search warrant.
But if there's more than one possible person to blame, and it needs to be
"determined" which is which on the evidence, you've reinvented the trial.
Vend
> Vend <ven...@virgilio.it> wrote in news:1c220584-772a-460d-bbc2-
>
> >> >As soon as it is determined that a piece of evidence has been obtained
> >> >illegally there could be an automatic punishment for the cops who
> >> >obtained it.
>
> >> do their job, but ...
>
> > Then punish who issued the wrong search warrant.
>
> But if there's more than one possible person to blame, and it needs to be
> "determined" which is which on the evidence, you've reinvented the trial.
If the action required a warrant and the cops did it without a
warrant, then punish the cops, if the warrant was issued illegally,
then punish the person who signed the warrant.
I'm not an expert of legal issues, but it doesn't look that
complicated.
Paul J Gans
Sure. Nobody disagrees with that. But errors happen. A
clerk writes 25 instead of 27 and the wrong house gets
raided.
I'm not disagreeing with your viewpoint, I'm simply noting that
this is a more complex problem than it seems.
Desertphile
Crime by police officers appears to be protected from prosecution
far too often. Mark Bunker was once attacked and battered by two
unidentified men while he was filming a documentary on a sidewalk
in Chicago; he got the attack on film, and there were many
witnesses including the people he was filming at the time. It
turned out that the men who attacked him were Chicago police
officers who said they "arrested him for tresspassing," though
every witness testified otherwise and the film would have snow
that was a lie.... except the police officers stole the film from
the camera while the camera was in "police custody."
Bunker was put on trial for tresspassing, and the jury not only
found him not guilty, but a few jury members were angry at the
police officers for lying.
The film was never returned to Bunker, and the police officers
were never indicted for perjury.
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz