Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Somewhere in Tokyo there’s a manga author furiously taking notes on this as the plot line. Three months from now a new manga will hit store shelves:
“I got killed and now I’m the key witness at my own murder trial”
Going sci-fi, but I think I remember there being a thing in the altered carbon books that kind of relates to this.
In that series most people have a device implanted that can store their consciousness, it can be backed up, etc. if you die your consciousness can be uploaded to a new body, maybe a clone of your own, maybe another spare body no one was using. They get around long space flights by just sending the stored consciousness into a new body at the destination, prisoners can be uploaded to storage and their bodies used elsewhere, etc. and the only way to reliably kill someone is to destroy that device, and if they’re rich enough they may have a remote backup so even that isn’t a guarantee.
So murder victims are routinely uploaded into new bodies to testify at their own murder trials.
Catholics oppose this though, they believe that your soul is separate from your consciousness and can’t be stored in that device, backed up, etc. and so to respect their religious rights they can’t be popped into a new body to testify.
I imagine that necromancy would have the same and probably stronger opposition from a lot of religious people and we’d run into the same kind of legal issues.
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. I’d imagine that it would only get worse without the eyes.
What do you call a deer with no eyes? No eye deer. What do you call a deer with no eyes and legs? Still no eye deer.
That said, I would hope that “was it your spouse that bashed your face in with a shovel?” Might hold gravity in a witness testimony. “Yes, we were alone in the bedroom and I asked them why they had a shovel in the house, to which they responded, listen to this”. “The sound was spectacular, THONK! just as you would expect, but then I realized this is exactly how their ex was found, I’m not looking forward to spending an eternity listening to their retelling, always went on for ages”
If Necromancy became possible, Micheal Jackson would do a shot for shot remake of the thriller video, without makeup.
The undead listen to a much higher authority than any mortal court. But that doesn’t stop the court from trying to summon them, but they might need a warrant wielding warlock to make it happen.
