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Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

At the same time though, a bunch of people who know each other and the people allegedly involved could very easily share the same incorrect testimony. You wouldn't believe in bigfoot if 5 guys drinking beers swore they saw him while they were camping. Sending someone to prison or worse is much higher stakes. DNA evidence might be too extreme, but I'd expect some sort of evidence to back up a testimony. "What if the witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.

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It's a nitpick, but testimony under oath is evidence to US courts. All evidence is either testimonial or circumstantial.

An old lecture on unreliability of witnesses:

https://youtu.be/GrAME1p2Ijs

Courts are not solving math equations and despite the popular belief to the contrary, most lawyers and judges are not bumbling fools. But to use math as an example of why you don't need an "impractically high" number of witnesses:

  - Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
  - Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
  - Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.

You still only need 3 witnesses telling the same story to reach >99.9% assurance of guilt. The odds of an innocent person getting convicted with 3 witnesses under this standard is 1 in 8,000.

In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.

And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.

Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.

Or perhaps the standards of evidence established for a pre-industrial society when eye-witness testimony was the best that could reasonably be achieved is not necessarily the optimal system for a digital society where everyone carries a high definition video camera in their pocket at all times.

Yes a high definition video camera that is slowly becoming indistinguishable (and has always been subject to tampering regardless) from an artificially generated version. We never have anything beyond judgement.

This is why crimes used to have prosecution time limits. Nobody expected eye witness accounts to surface after 40 years. But DNA is eternal.

DNA is not eternal, but neither is anyone's memory trustworthy for that long.

Prosecution time limits and those pesky rights people have is why so much stuff that would've been simple misdemeanors 70+yr ago is now "administrative" and "civil" law.

But in what way do you believe these standards are inadequate? Video from phones is used in courts when available and admissible.

I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict. It's rarely going to be 100% clear cut so the jury has to use their judgment.

> I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict.

Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.

Jury nullification is a double edged sword. There are near countless examples of a jury determining a white man killing a black man isn’t a valid reason to take the white man’s freedom.

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