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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  Maybe this should be the standard for the legal system 
  too: allow eye witness testimony to guide police
  investigation but not be used as courtroom evidence.

I used to think this, until I had to sit on a jury. I ended up trying a case where the accused had allegedly gone to the victim's home, knocked on the door, then barged in and punched the victim a few times when he answered the door. Hospital records and photos meant no-one disputed the victim had been punched. But what evidence was there that the accused was the attacker? Only the eyewitness testimony of the accused and his wife.

I struggle to see how such a case could be prosecuted without eyewitness testimony? Unless perhaps people put CCTV cameras all around in their own homes, and to me that doesn't sound like an improvement in civil liberties.

(After we found the guy guilty, the judge revealed the accused was awaiting trial for two other very similar offences with different victims)

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>I struggle to see how such a case could be prosecuted without eyewitness testimony?

Maybe it shouldn't be then. Just because a crime happened doesn't mean someone has to be punished for it irrespective of their actual guilt.

Do you want the punisher (tm)? This is how we get the punisher(tm).

> Just because a crime happened doesn't mean someone has to be punished for it irrespective of their actual guilt.

The failure to prosecute the case of someone attacking someone else in their home merely creates an incentive for people to enact more violence in response, because the system fails to ensure baseline safety and won't be able to hold them accountable for their revenge.

Punishment for violence against others is required to have a peaceable society.

You can argue what you are, but you're advocating for a world of anarchy and uncontested violence.

I can hardly see why respecting due process leads to anarchism or violence.

In your scenario, why wouldn't people take revenge on each other by making false accusations and getting their enemies thrown in jail?

It's not like putting people in prison is a peaceful thing. It's a very violent ordeal, it's just violence that the state perpetrates on your behalf. We have to be sure that it's worth while.

> I ended up trying a case where the accused had allegedly gone to the victim's home, knocked on the door, then barged in and punched the victim a few times when he answered the door. Hospital records and photos meant no-one disputed the victim had been punched. But what evidence was there that the accused was the attacker? Only the eyewitness testimony of the accused and his wife.

Because we're not talking about an abstract situation of sans evidence accusations, and because that's already a problem -- even without eyewitness testimony being admissible.

We're talking about the different rates of bad things we can have in real compromises we can enact for real situations: if you go so far towards never convicting the innocent that you never convict violent home invasions, society will break down.

You can think that's justice, I was just connecting the choice with the outcome.

As counterpoint, one could say that you're advocating for a world in which it is better to sentence an innocent person for a crime than to let the crime go unpunished.

>Unless perhaps people put CCTV cameras all around in their own homes, and to me that doesn't sound like an improvement in civil liberties.

The typical solution that doesn't infringe on personal freedom is to let people posses whatever arms and armaments they want in their own homes (letting people do whatever in their own homes is good policy in almost all contexts). If there's even a 1:10 chance of getting swiss cheesed this sort of "inflict violence on a random stranger in their own home" type of crime falls of a cliff. It's also a preventative solution because it makes the difficulty of successfully committing the crime harder compared to a reactive solution (like CCTV) that only makes the chance of getting caught afterward higher.

As an aside I'm expecting a record low number of home invasions in Texas for 2019 considering the two high profile cases where the people breaking in got a little bit more resistance than they were expecting.

That's quite different from the sort of eye witness testimony discussed in the article, though. The odds of accidentally incorrectly identifying your own spouse is pretty damn low.

Your case more about he-said-she-said than 'our own eyes lying to us'. Completely different issues.

You misread the OP, the husband was attacked by another person, the husband and the wife identified the attacker as the defendant.

He didn't, the OP says 'accused and his wife', which really reads as though he admitted it.

I'm sure what was meant was 'victim and his wife' though.

Correct.

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