Gonna need a couple sources there, buddy. Sounds poetic but, like most poetry, a little bit hyperbolic.
No they’re right eyewitness testimony has turned out to be shit. In your responses it looks like you go out of your way to miss the entire body of eyewitness experiments.
That wasn’t the point I was addressing, but I appreciate you providing sources!
The unreliability of eyewitness statements isn’t in question, I’ll happily agree that it’s total shit. But, while we’ve only recently quantified just how bad it is, the fact that it’s unreliable is not new information (this is actually at the heart of “beyond reasonable doubt”). For the same reason, nobody’s done the police procedural trope of a “Perp Walk” in years because of how demonstrably terrible it was. Criminal cases have required more than simply eyewitness accounts to establish a case for a very long time, and I wasn’t arguing that. I was pointing out that at no point in history was a (relatively) fair court system so broken that more than half of people convicted were innocent. That’s just ridiculous.
That was the point though. For hundreds of years we relied greatly on eyewitness testimony. And the state was incentivized to find people guilty for labor at home or in colonies. It’s why half the bill of rights has to do with rights in criminal proceedings.
… wikipedia how trials were done in the 1800s? This is, and I can’t stress this enough, common sense.
Man, sorry, this just sounds like you doubling down on not knowing what you’re talking about (For example, in what world has trial law ever been common sense?)
By the haploid genes of christ themself, you cannot say that witness testimony is unreliable while claiming that modern DNA evidence has somehow improved things. It screams that you’ve bought in to the borderline propaganda of modern media, that forensic evidence is in any way reliable. The internet is rife with reporting about how unreliable it is, in fact.
Seriously, unless someone confessed or was caught in the act, they were innocent when convicted? Statiscially most people convicted were innocent? Where in the hell are you getting this? Please, enlighten me, since my digging in wikipedia has failed to find a source to support your position (though the number of articles on trial law in the 1800s is… small, to say the least)
Look, I’m not arguing about the violence of the state or that trial procedure has been (and is) awfully biased, but specifically trial procedure is nothing like (and has never been) as bad as you imply it is/was.
🤔 to my understanding DNA evidence is one of the very few things that is actually reliable when it comes to forensic science. What issues do you have with it?
Yeah okay. Witness testimony is less accurate than chance. Before other forms of evidence, the main evidence used was witness testimony. Therefore, logically, less than half of people convicted were guilty of the crime charged in jury trials.