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Eyewitness accounts are the best evidence there is.

Ask any lawyer, judge, or prosecutor.

Eyewitness accounts are used every day in criminal and civil trials.

The government even has a witness protection program.

Loose nuts sink ships.

Eyewitness accounts are the best evidence there is.

Ask any lawyer, judge, or prosecutor. Eyewitness accounts are used every day in criminal and civil trials.

Hell, yes! I'm appalled by how many people here have suddenly decided to play the old, two-bit Public Defender routine, trying to convince others that an eyewitness "didn't see what he thought he saw." It's one thing to say that sometimes eyewitnesses err--it's something entirely different---and wholly insidious---to cop the attitude that eyewitness testimony ipso facto has to completely discounted.

Maybe it's due to some kind of corrupt psychological syndrome in the wake of the Fl. 800 cover-up...

A good friend of mine (bestman at her wedding) is a defense attorney. What lawyers will tell you is this:
For swaying a jury nothing is better than eyewitnesses, people believe other people quicker than they'll believe anything else.
For finding out what happened, check with eyewitnesses last if at all, it's been well doccumented that it's very easy to change what people think they saw just in how you phrase the question, human memory is amazingly fallible.

We did a test in my psych class (based on a semi-famous test done years earlier) that really showed just how crappy human memory really is. In this test we're shown "live footage" of a car accident then given a sheet with 10 questions about the accident, all short answer stuff. There were a couple of "seed" questions in there, things phrased to push you towards changing your memory of the accident. Then we collated the answers and rewatched the the accident. My favorite question was "did the pickup truck in the accident have a gun wrack?", only one person in class (about 40, no I wasn't the smart one) answered correctly, which was: what pickup truck, there weren't any. No that's a little unsubtle, but it's lack of subtlety illustrates the point: 39 out of 40 people had their memories edited to include a non-existent pickup because the question made them decide they were wrong.

Keep that in mind when you're on a jury. Eyewitness testimony ain't worth squat. But people worship it.