Bad part about that - even today - is that we know for a fact that what people remember/recall isn't necessarily what actually occurred. Also, as time goes on, those recollections can become more unreliable.

We know that the mind confabulates, making things up to fill in gaps - both at the time something occurs, and after the fact to "fill in the story".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/

https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/starklab/false-memory-eyewitne...

Unfortunately, the legal system has been slow in acknowledging this - on top of so many other things found and/or known to be false or bias - two big ones are so-called "lie detector" systems, and "blood spatter analysis".

Fortunately, lie detector "evidence" is generally not admissible in the United States (at least I think for criminal cases?) - but blood spatter analysis is still considered to be a "real science", when it may be anything but:

https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/blood-spatter-...

We had this brief period of history where good records of actual events were cheap to capture and expensive/impossible to fake (governments have been airbrushing photos for most of this period, but videos seem to have been tougher). We're at the end of that now, but the public hasn't quite caught on. I think it'll take at least one high profile case getting overturned before society at large stops believing in videos. Then we're essentially back to trusting people at their word/digital-signature, and we'll probably have "trusted" security camera companies that install tamper-proof cameras at multiple angles that cryptographically sign videos while streaming them to remote servers. Before that, and probably after it as well, some of us will rot behind bars based on state-forged evidence.