The First Shot

[Andrew Mason]

I know it is.
That requires common sense.
Because they did not accurately recall the event. Very common among eyewitnesses.

Defence counsel want you on their juries.

[John Corbett]

Defence counsel want you on their juries.

As it should be. The defendant gets the benefit of the doubt in criminal trials. A prosecutor who relies primarily on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony will leave me with lots of doubt.

The innocence Project has gotten hundreds of wrongfully convicted people exonerated through DNA and other hard evidence. The vast majority of these wrongful convictions were due to erroneous eyewitness accounts. Jurors have a tendency to place too much faith in the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. That makes no sense to me because it is far less reliable than physical evidence and expert testimony.

You should read the following, not that I expect it will do you any good.

https://innocenceproject.org/eyewitness-misidentification/

[John Corbett]

Another article on the unreliability of eyewitness accounts:

https://lawshun.com/article/is-eyewitness-testimony-reliable-in-the-court-of-law

The last paragraph in this article pretty much sums up my skepticism of eyewitnesses. In fact this single sentence spells out my reasons for not placing blind trust in eyewitnesses:

"While eyewitness accounts can provide valuable insights, they must be treated with caution and corroborated with other evidence whenever possible."

That is exactly what I've been saying on this forum since I first began participating in it earlier this year.

[John Corbett]

Still another law journal article questioning the reliability of eyewitness memory:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13657127211031018

This sentence jumped out at me:

"However, research clearly shows that memory does not operate like a video recorder and that a witness's memory will often not be a full and accurate description of an event."

How many times have I said the human brain is not equipped with a DVR?

[Andrew Mason]

Still another law journal article questioning the reliability of eeyewitness memory:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13657127211031018

This sentence jumped out at me:

"However, research clearly shows that memory does not operate like a video recorder and that a witness's memory will often not be a full and accurate description of an event."

How many times have I said the human brain is not equipped with a DVR?

That is-why witnesses are cross-examined by opposing parties and why fact finders look for corroboration.

While witnesses make errors it is exceedingly rare that two witnesses will independently make up the same wrong story about what occurred.

Witnesses can be induced to misidentify a person. But eyewitness identification of someone they do not know is not fact recollection. It is an after-event opinion that the person they saw was the same person shown to them. That is completely different than someone hearing a shot pattern or observing what happened after hearing the first shot.

[Lance Payette]

To discuss the reliability of eyewitness testimony in general terms is very misleading. A civil or criminal trial is often long after the event - sometimes years. In the interim, witnesses have been interviewed or deposed, prepped by lawyers, influenced by conversations and media coverage, emotionally bonded with one side or the other. We see this in Mark Lane's interviews and the way that many prominent JFKA witnesses' stories got markedly "better" over the years and decades. Studies with hoax UFOs (i.e., designed to fool witnesses) showed that people accurately described what they saw (e.g., three flashing lights in a triangular formation) but simply misinterpreted it as otherworldly - but, then, the study had been designed to fool them by having the phenomenon not easily fit any known aircraft. With a witness's description right after an event, we are really not talking about "fallibility of memory" but simply "accuracy of perception." With the JFKA eyewitnesses and earwitnesses, we'd have to take into account the sudden, very short and wholly unanticipated nature of the event and the circumstances of each eyewitness or earwitness - location, what he or she was doing at the time, etc., etc. To simply "count heads" is likely to be very misleading. Harold Norman thought the "first shot" sounded different and seemed really only certain about the second and third - and the rifle was supposedly right above his head! Regarding Glen Bennett, one would think his training would make him a solid witness - but he said he heard "what sounded like a firecracker." Given the number of witnesses who said the "first shot" sounded different from the others, I'm not sure that we can reasonably attribute these descriptions to a missed gunshot - especially given the lack of other other evidence for such a gunshot and the wildly different estimates as to when it occurred.

[John Corbett]

That is-why witnesses are cross-examined by opposing parties and why fact finders look for corroboration.

While witnesses make errors it is exceedingly rare that two witnesses will independently make up the same wrong story about what occurred.

Witnesses can be induced to misidentify a person. But eyewitness identification of someone they do not know is not fact recollection. It is an after-event opinion that the person they saw was the same person shown to them. That is completely different than someone hearing a shot pattern or observing what happened after hearing the first shot.

You're being ridiculous. Everything the witnesses tell us is "an after-event opinion" and there is no reason to believe a witness' after-event recollection of  a shot pattern is any more reliable than their identification of a perpetrator. As the one article pointed out, the human mind does not have a video recorder. All recollections by witnesses are subject to memory fallibility. If humans perfectly remembered details, there would be unanimity of the recollections of the shot pattern. Clearly there was not.