Re:Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to min...
by 988747 on Friday July 16, 2021 @11:11AM
(#27857064)
But disregarding witness testimonies puts us on even more dangerous path: in order to know "objective facts" you need to put surveilance cameras and microphones everywhere so there is a video footage of every crime.
Re:Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to min...
by dionidium on Friday July 16, 2021 @11:41AM
(#27857445)
> The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit.
Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to assume you can educate your way out of this. You could send every citizen through a six-week course on the problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage of them will come out on the other side of that training insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime, then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit. If you show 10 people an event and ask them to describe what they saw an hour later, they will describe it in 10 different ways, frequently changing facts, adding things that never happened, or omitting important details. In trials, you get witness testimony from years before, and it's treated as if every single word said is absolute objective truth - like, we have the science to prove that no, actually, most likely it isn't, and it should be treated as "maybe true" at best.