Lets try another hypothetical. This man claims that it was in fact you who killed your wife, and he happened to see it. There’s no physical evidence to show otherwise, it’s just your word against his.
Should you go to jail? Or is his claim that you committed a crime somehow now suspect, in a way that your claim that he did isn’t?
Oh certainly, if other evidence backs up your claim that he wasn’t threatened, and none his claim that he was, the situation changes.
But that’s not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about a situation where it’s purely one person’s word against another’s.
That sounds like a profoundly unjust world, and a world in which it’s very easy to get away with murder – it doesn’t matter if you have a witness or two, just don’t shoot them in the back. You can always claim they were threatening you.
No, you’re still misreading (I think deliberately, at this point) what I’m typing. It’s reasonable for juries to think witness testimony is untrustworthy, and the accused is trustworthy, and it’s reasonable for juries to find the opposite – even if it’s just one witness, or if the witness is a friend or relative of the deceased.
Insisting that a jury cannot reasonably find that witnesses are reliable and the accused is not if the claim is self-defense is, to me, equivalently deranged to insisting that it’s morally wrong to try and free slaves.
I agree. And yet it’s still reasonable that a jury might conceivably find a witness more reliable than the accused, even for claims of self-defense, and might reasonably conclude that reasonable doubt is eliminated.
That’s totally different – in the Dunn case, Dunn says he shot the deceased. Who shot who is not in doubt. The same goes for my hypothetical – the killer admits he shot my wife, and there’s overwhelming evidence that he shot my wife.
So you’re wholly altering my hypothetical such that it’s not relevant to this discussion.
But I’ll answer it anyway – if there’s no physical evidence one way or the other, and it’s just my word against his, then unless it’s very very clear that one of us is lying, then the jury must find him not guilty.
It’s not purely one person’s word against another – Dunn admits he shot the deceased. There’s no doubt Dunn pulled the trigger. The only question is whether the deceased threatened Dunn – and it’s entirely reasonable that the jury might choose to believe the witnesses, or believe Dunn’s story. They believed the witnesses, and concluded that Dunn was lying – probably because they already determined he was a liar about self-defense.
Dunn lied about self-defense with regards to the shots he fired as the witnesses fled.
Why can’t the jury decide he was lying about self-defense with regards to shooting the deceased?
It is bizarre, and the only reason I can imagine for such vehemence is that Steophan is convinced that he will need to shoot someone at some point, and is terrified by the thought that he might go to jail for it. Otherwise, his “murderer’s paradise” worldview makes no sense. It’s certainly not a world I want to live in.
It certainly makes “the perfect murder” incredibly easy. Wow, would it be easy to get away with murder in Steophan’s world. Just make sure there are no cameras and no audio recordings, don’t shoot them in front of hundreds of people, and don’t shoot them in the back.
“Hey Bob, come into the bathroom with me. Sure, you can bring your friends. Now, look right at me…” BANG BANG BANG!!!
Ok. I disagree with your opinion, and more to the point: your opinion isn’t the law.
In the real world, the jury is free to find guilt solely from witness statements. You’re welcome to insist it should be otherwise, but not welcome to suggest it IS otherwise.
Keep in mind that he also insists the jury in the case of Emmett Till, the boy beaten and murdered for whistling at a white woman, who’s killers were acquitted by an all-white jury which was instructed to “do their Anglo-Saxon jury” made the right decision.
He also has yet to explain why he’s so certain that Davis, the murdered, unarmed teenage boy, was “a thug” who deserved to be killed.
Do you have links?
It’s extraordinarily unlikely, almost inconceivable that I would ever shoot somebody.
Morality isn’t entirely tied to what I want for myself, believe it or not. I simply believe that self defence is a basic right, and that no-one should be convicted of a crime without proof. If someone claims self defence, it is required to prove it wasn’t before convicting them IMHO.
I doubt that would make any sort of “murder’s paradise”. That assumes that there are legions of people out there who are just itching to kill someone, if they could only get away with it, and able to plan so carefully that they could commit said murder in such a way that they’d be sure there were no independent witnesses or forensic evidence.
Yes, it would probably happen occasionally. I consider that an acceptable price to pay to allow people to defend themselves, and to keep innocent people out of jail.
This is all fine – it just seems totally bizarre to insist that juries can’t choose to find witness testimony persuasive.
In the Dunn case, they already knew he was a liar – he lied about self-defense for the shots while the witnesses fled. Why couldn’t they decide he was still lying about the other claim of self-defense?
On the Emmett Till issue, yes, the jury made the right decision based on the evidence they were given, which did not include actual evidence that Till was dead, for starters. The blame falls on the prosecution for not providing that evidence (which they had) and the witnesses who lied at the trial.
Not that I believe that the jury would have found them guilty if that evidence had been provided, but that’s not point. The jury should only find guilt if the evidence provided to them at trial proves beyond reasonable doubt that the accused are guilty. In this case it did not, but evidence (including statements from the murderers) released later does so. Much like OJ Simpson, where the total evidence is enough to show that result of the trial wasn’t correct. The prosecutor is at least partly to blame in that case, too.
They could, that’s not the issue. The point is that uncorroborated testimony from potentially biased witnesses is not, in my opinion, sufficient for proof of guilt.
If a jury decides a witness is lying, they may ignore his testimony, but may not consider it evidence for the opposite of what he claims.
By your argument, if my friend accuses you of stealing from them, I back up their testimony, and the jury doesn’t believe your claim you didn’t do it, that alone should be enough to convict you. I don’t accept that.
Their testimony was corroborated by the other witnesses (each other), and it did not contradict any physical evidence.
Right – they considered the rest of the evidence, including the witnesses’ testimony, as evidence for the opposite of what he claimed.
No – it’s not necessarily enough, but it could be. It depends on the nature of the testimony.
Steophan, I usually disregard your posts because I abhor racists but this time I’ll avoid you due to extreme stupidity. Wow.
That’s a convincing argument. Well done.
Well I posted that in self defense so…
You felt threatened. I’m a witness.