The shocking thing is that before video and DNA evidence, pretty much all murders were never actually solved.
Witness testimony has been the cornerstone of most criminal cases in history, but witness testimony has been scientifically proven, repeatedly, to be entirely unreliable in all circumstances. Unless a killer confessed out of nowhere or was caught in the act, statistically they were innocent regardless of whatever twelve untrained yahoos were convinced of.
The state, all states, have killed more innocent people with permission from the citizenry than any arbitrary group of civilian criminals in history, included ng all terror groups combined.
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.
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.
Ah, I think youve misunderstood some numbers. The best stats I have found indicate that ~75% of overturned cases used eyewitness testimony, and 1/3 of those (so ~20% of all) were found to use faulty testimony from two or more eyewitnesses.
Those are a tiny slice of cases, I’m not sure how many total convictions there have been but best numbers on the time period in question is tens of thousands. The court system either modern or historic has some serious fucking problems, an inability to correct its mistakes being one of the more prominent ones. But a 50+% false conviction rate has never been one of them, come on.
It’s nearly impossible to overturn a case, I never brought that up or suggested that.where you got confused is that you haven’t kept up with any scientific research in the last hundred years relating to human memory, especially under stress
Eyewitness testimony is as reliable as lie detectors, ouiji boards, and Dosing rods for fact finding.
I brought that up because it’s the only example I’ve been able to find (I didn’t try all that hard, but still) of how faulty eyewitnesses testimony impacts case outcomes. It’s also not almost impossible to get a case overturned, we have an entire court system devoted to hearing appeals. You just fundementally don’t know what you’re talking about.
A truly miniscule number of cases are based off of a single eyewitnesses’ testimony, either historically or in the modern era.
There’s also physical and circumstantial evidence, not just eye witness. And I don’t think you fully grasp the concept of "logic. “Eye witness” being a highly unreliable source doesn’t make “correct convictions” less likely than a coin toss
You’re talking out your ass and trolling. Go home, peasant
🤔 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?
Unfortunately your understanding, and that of nearly every juror in the US, is wrong. Tainted by the pro-police television narrative, that cops never mess up and that all crimes can be solved with the application of Forensic Science™. The link I provided elaborates further, but one reason from the concerningly long list: DNA testing really is little more than circumstantial evidence - it’s ridiculously easy for your DNA to show up at the scene of a crime you were not involved with. In general, it’s more precise than blood splatter or ballistic analyses, but not nearly by the margin you think.
“Common sense” often just means “intuitive”, “expected”, or “uninformed”. The problem is that reality is very often not so simple so that’s not much of an argument, especially if you have no studies to link to to confirm your hypothesis.
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.
If the courts are just throwing everyone in prison anyways, it’s sort of a moot point.
(The claim they’re making is dumb and their understanding of statistics is worse. They’ve provided 0 evidence, or even coherent arguments. Listen, I like you, I see you on here all the time. Why are you defending this troll?)
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that eyewitness testimony is reliable, or that historical courts weren’t bad. But it’s important not to exaggerate how bad institutions were in the past - it makes it all too easy to dismiss the failures of those same present-day institutions by comparing them to how they bad they used to be.
The shocking thing is that before video and DNA evidence, pretty much all murders were never actually solved.
Witness testimony has been the cornerstone of most criminal cases in history, but witness testimony has been scientifically proven, repeatedly, to be entirely unreliable in all circumstances. Unless a killer confessed out of nowhere or was caught in the act, statistically they were innocent regardless of whatever twelve untrained yahoos were convinced of. The state, all states, have killed more innocent people with permission from the citizenry than any arbitrary group of civilian criminals in history, included ng all terror groups combined.
Gonna need a couple sources there, buddy. Sounds poetic but, like most poetry, a little bit hyperbolic.
… 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.
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.
Ah, I think youve misunderstood some numbers. The best stats I have found indicate that ~75% of overturned cases used eyewitness testimony, and 1/3 of those (so ~20% of all) were found to use faulty testimony from two or more eyewitnesses.
Those are a tiny slice of cases, I’m not sure how many total convictions there have been but best numbers on the time period in question is tens of thousands. The court system either modern or historic has some serious fucking problems, an inability to correct its mistakes being one of the more prominent ones. But a 50+% false conviction rate has never been one of them, come on.
It’s nearly impossible to overturn a case, I never brought that up or suggested that.where you got confused is that you haven’t kept up with any scientific research in the last hundred years relating to human memory, especially under stress
Eyewitness testimony is as reliable as lie detectors, ouiji boards, and Dosing rods for fact finding.
I brought that up because it’s the only example I’ve been able to find (I didn’t try all that hard, but still) of how faulty eyewitnesses testimony impacts case outcomes. It’s also not almost impossible to get a case overturned, we have an entire court system devoted to hearing appeals. You just fundementally don’t know what you’re talking about.
A truly miniscule number of cases are based off of a single eyewitnesses’ testimony, either historically or in the modern era.
I don’t mean this offensively, but are you on the spectrum?
There’s also physical and circumstantial evidence, not just eye witness. And I don’t think you fully grasp the concept of "logic. “Eye witness” being a highly unreliable source doesn’t make “correct convictions” less likely than a coin toss
You’re talking out your ass and trolling. Go home, peasant
Do try to keep up with a conversation if you enter it.
K
🤔 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?
Unfortunately your understanding, and that of nearly every juror in the US, is wrong. Tainted by the pro-police television narrative, that cops never mess up and that all crimes can be solved with the application of Forensic Science™. The link I provided elaborates further, but one reason from the concerningly long list: DNA testing really is little more than circumstantial evidence - it’s ridiculously easy for your DNA to show up at the scene of a crime you were not involved with. In general, it’s more precise than blood splatter or ballistic analyses, but not nearly by the margin you think.
“Common sense” often just means “intuitive”, “expected”, or “uninformed”. The problem is that reality is very often not so simple so that’s not much of an argument, especially if you have no studies to link to to confirm your hypothesis.
”He looks guilty enough, hang him”
Hell, replace “guilty” with “black” and you’ve got the current legal system.
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.
Hence:
If the courts are just throwing everyone in prison anyways, it’s sort of a moot point.
(The claim they’re making is dumb and their understanding of statistics is worse. They’ve provided 0 evidence, or even coherent arguments. Listen, I like you, I see you on here all the time. Why are you defending this troll?)
I’m more trying to make sure people don’t come by and get the wrong idea about eyewitness testimony or courts in history.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that eyewitness testimony is reliable, or that historical courts weren’t bad. But it’s important not to exaggerate how bad institutions were in the past - it makes it all too easy to dismiss the failures of those same present-day institutions by comparing them to how they bad they used to be.
Yeah but we still get it wrong with only eyewitness testimony. That cannot be enough anymore.
-some person