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The reasonable doubt standard aims to reduce the chances of an innocent person being convicted. Criminal cases can result in hefty convictions, including death or life sentences, so a person should only be charged if the jurors are 100% confident, based on the evidence presented, of their guilt.
The jurors must walk into the courtroom presuming the accused is innocent. Reasonable doubt exists unless the prosecution can prove that the accused is guilty. This can be achieved by supplying evidence and inviting people to testify on the stand.
A reasonable doubt is a doubt based upon reason and common sense and is not based purely on speculation. It may arise from a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence, or from lack of evidence.
If after a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence, you are not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, it is your duty to find the defendant not guilty. On the other hand, if after a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence, you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, it is your duty to find the defendant guilty.
The reasonable doubt standard, originally and now, serves to minimize the chances that an innocent person will be convicted, but the reason for striving to avoid that outcome has been the subject of dispute. Although the standard now serves to make conviction difficult or at least to increase the accuracy of a determination of guilt, one scholar, Yale Law Professor James Q. Whitman, has written that its original purpose was to make conviction easier.1
Although the reasonable doubt standard was well known to the Framers of the Constitution, neither the original document nor any provision of the Bill of Rights guaranteed that standard in criminal trials. The standard was regularly included in jury charges in both federal court and state court trials, but it was not until 1970 that the Supreme Court ruled that the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guaranteed a defendant the right have the standard included in a jury charge.16
I think it unlikely that appellate courts today would approve a reasonable doubt instruction that uses a number. Nevertheless, writing for the future, I believe that the most effective way to tell jurors that the reasonable doubt standard means near certainty that the defendant is guilty is to give the following instruction:
I recognize that whatever formulation is used will rarely result in reversing a conviction for lack of sufficient evidence. That is entirely appropriate. Most federal trial judges can be expected to reject a verdict of guilty only where a jury could not reasonably conclude that guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. And the three-tiered reconsideration of state court convictions by federal courts on habeas corpus review will also almost always suffice to reject an insufficiently supported verdict of guilt.
When a case presents a serious issue as to whether the evidence sufficed to permit a jury to have faithfully observed the reasonable doubt standard in finding a defendant guilty, a reviewing court will be more likely to enforce that standard when it asks whether the jury could reasonably have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
He may be found unreliable if he is inconsistent about details of what he saw (e.g. tells different stories at different times), if he has had some conflicts with Alice, if he is on Bob's payroll and so on.
From the outset, however, you should understand that you are the sole judges of the facts. In respect of all disputes about matters of fact in this case, it will be you and not I who will have to resolve them. In part, that means that it is entirely up to you to decide what evidence is to be accepted and what evidence is to be rejected. For that reason you need to pay careful attention to each witness as their evidence is given. You should not only listen to what the witnesses say but also watch them as they give their evidence. How a witness presents to you and how he or she responds to questioning, especially in cross-examination, may assist you in deciding whether or not you accept what that witness was saying as truthful and reliable. You are entitled to accept part of what a witness says and reject other parts of the evidence.
The number of witnesses does not mathematically add up to reasonable doubt or not. It all depends on what the jury finds credible. Dozens of witnesses who hated Alice would not be so credible as one witness who hated David, another suspect, and loved Alice but said that Alice had done it.
Could Charles by mistaken? If Alice is one of 100 customers to enter Bobs store that day, then it could easily be a person who looks similar to Alice. If Bob, Alice and Charles have been coworkers for years, it is most likely no mistake. Unless Alice has an identical twin.
It is upon the trier of fact to evaluate what happened. A case can be held entirely based on evidence with 0 witnesses that actually saw the act to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. However, all those analysts and investigators, and other experts are to be called to explain the evidence and their significance... as witnesses. Not calling them as (indirect) witnesses means, the evidence should not come in under Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009).
Any number of witnesses - be they experts, investigators or direct eyewitness - that can make the finder of fact believe that it is beyond a reasonable doubt is enough. Any number can be 0 eyewitnesses, 0 experts, and the one 1 investigator saying "I met Alice an hour after the incident and she was acting strange when I told her Bob is dead."
Since you need to convince the finder of fact that someone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, you could have millions of people that all claim Alice did it, maybe because of the news reports, but because nobody of them has more information than the news reporter, who invented half his story, all of their testimony is hearsay and worth nothing. They can not testify. Not even the investigator can testify about things told to them, as established by Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), overruling Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980).
While establishing reasonable doubt during trial can protect you against a guilty verdict, establishing reasonable doubt before trial could keep your case out of court entirely. For example, depending on the facts and circumstances of your case, your defense lawyer may be able to:
Are you facing criminal charges in Pennsylvania? If so, we strongly encourage you to contact us for a free consultation. Philadelphia criminal defense lawyer Brian Fishman will thoroughly evaluate your case and determine what options you have available. To schedule an appointment as soon as possible, call 267-758-2228 or tell us how we can reach you online now.
We, the undersigned, hereby declare our view that there is room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare, and that it is an important question for anyone seeking to understand the works, the formative literary culture in which they were produced, or the nature of literary creativity and genius.
Many people think that Mr. Shakspere (a frequent spelling of his name, used here to distinguish him from the author) claimed to have written the works. No such record exists. The case for him as the author rests largely on testimony in the First Folio collection of the plays, published in 1623, seven years after he died. However, nothing in the contemporaneous documentary evidence of his life confirms the Folio testimony. If Mr. Shakspere was the author, there should be definitive evidence of it from his lifetime. There is none. Not that there are no reasons to think that Mr. Shakspere wrote the works, but we find them inconclusive.
3. Perhaps the strongest link to Mr. Shakspere is the apparent testimony of actors Heminges and Condell. Neither of them was a writer, however, and several scholars doubt that they wrote the passages attributed to them. Some think their Folio testimony sounds like a sales pitch, urging undecided readers to purchase. Most orthodox scholars are untroubled by the lack of corroboration, limited specifics, ambiguities, puffery and unclear role of Mr. Shakspere's fellow actors. Skeptics ask why the Folio is not more straightforward, and why such a great outpouring of eulogies only occurred following seven years of silence after his death.
If the case for Mr. Shakspere were otherwise sound, the problems in these four areas would hardly matter. Unfortunately, once one looks beyond them, one finds no contemporaneous evidence that Mr. Shakspere was even a professional writer, much less that he was the poet-playwright William Shakespeare. Further, much contemporaneous evidence that has come to light seems at odds with his having been Shakespeare. Of a few great writers, like Homer, we know nothing at all; but there is only one great writer about whom the more we learn, the less he appears to have been a writer. How can this be for England's Shakespeare?
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