[t-shirt]

No. I'm saying that one should never take eyewitnesses accounts at face value -- they are notoriously unreliable.

39 posted on 11/12/01 10:44 AM Pacific by Junior

Then why do courts consider eyewitness accounts the most reliable and strongest evidence in criminal cases?

LOL! Do you make this stuff up?
If your twisted arguments were true rapist, robbers, and murderers and other violent criminals would rarely ever be convicted.

[mlo]

Then why do courts consider eyewitness accounts the most reliable and strongest evidence in criminal cases?

They don't, although jurors often do. Look, it's just a fact. Like it or not, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. It is the worst form of evidence. I've heard of one study that said eyewitness testimony was incorrect 89% of the time. Deal with it.

[Junior]

Then why do courts consider eyewitness accounts the most reliable and strongest evidence in criminal cases?

They don't. Eyewitness testimony is often used to corroborate physical evidence, but no prosecutor or defense attorney will base a case only upon it. Numerous experiments have been conducted on the reliability of eyewitnesses, and in every case different witnesses remembered seeing different things. The show, "Law and Order," played this up in an episode a few years ago when a group of witnesses to a murder could not agree on what the murderer looked like.

Anyone who has followed the "Repressed Memory" phenomenon over the past few years knows how easy it is to manufacture memories, which is another aspect of the non-corroborating eyewitness phenomenon. In other words, the human memory is a highly maleable thingy.

[ez2muz]

"...courts consider eyewitness accounts the most reliable and strongest evidence..."

That's pretty funny!

LMAO!

[DugwayDuke]

Courts offer the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. That's why much credibility is given to them. The "eyewitnesses" to TWA have not been cross-examined to test their credibility.