[mlo]

I always hear that eyewitnesses aren't reliable, but yet out society and legal system uses eyewitnesses everyday to jail and excecute people.

In other words, eyewitnesses are more reliable than anything else... like profilers, psychologists and psychics!

No, you've taken the wrong conclusion. Even if you are right about the legal system that can't make eyewitnesses more reliable than anything else when they aren't. And it is a fact that they aren't. All it means is that juries have to make a decision based on the information available to them, and that is often eyewitness testimony. This is not the question.

The question is, if you have some physical evidence that says one thing, and an eyewitness that says something else, what do you go with? The obvious answer *should* be, the physical evidence. The conspiracist often says the eyewitness and insists the phyical evidence must be faked.

[spycatcher]

Of course hard evidence is more reliable, but we're obviously talking about where we have no hard evidence to otherwise go on.

Eyewitnesses are as reliable as good circumstantial evidence which is also used to convict people.

[spycatcher]

Oh, and forensic evidence is overrated as well. There are often conflicting experts legitimately saying the physical evidence points in opposite directions. So much for any guarantee of certainty. DNA of course is a modern exception. But even then, lab results can and have been faked by police techs loking for the big bust. One Oklahoma woman was recently found faking lab results for her whole career. And of course the FBI lab has been castigated recently for massive problems with key physical evidence.

Each case is unique and nothing should be discounted out of hand. Especially in cases like TWA800 where there may be hundreds of independent eyewitnesses (including pilots) to the exact same thing, yet the "hard science" in the case is boiled down to a CIA video that defies all physics laws known on planet earth. And where fanciful speculation about an innocent spark igniting the fuel tank is deemed to be fact.