Reliability of Witness Testimony
Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2022 12:50 am
Here are 46 cases in which false eyewitness testimony put innocent people on death row:
https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/lega ... C2001A.pdf
Here is an experiment on how much people value eyewitness testimony:
52 percent of all the innocent people convicted were the result of eyewitness testimony.
It's really interesting to see Daniel treat the testimony of the 11 witnesses as something akin to the apostles going out across the world to spread the Good News after Christ's death. There's just something about these 19th century men being led into a forest by a convicted treasure digger that doesn't seem to convince your average everyday thinking person. Especially when these people were so credulous as to follow Joseph into those same forests looking for ancient caches of gold... which mysteriously never materialized. Tell a thinking person that Joe used the same stone to look for treasure as to translate this 200lb golden book, and the person should be sufficiently inoculated against Mormon emotional manipulation.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... heard.html
https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/lega ... C2001A.pdf
Here is an experiment on how much people value eyewitness testimony:
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights- ... ewitnessesTo determine what role eyewitness testimony played in the courtroom, psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Lofthus conducted an experiment in which subjects served as jurors in a mock trial. First, all jurors heard the same description of the crime, a hypothetical robbery and murder. In one version of the trial, the prosecutor presented only circumstantial evidence. Only 18 percent of the jurors found the defendant guilty. In the second version of the trial the prosecutor presented the same evidence with one addition—an eyewitness. Seventy-two percent of the jurors found the defendant guilty. This led Lofthus to conclude that jurors place enormous value on eyewitness testimony.
Studies have shown that mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for about half of all wrongful convictions. Researchers at Ohio State University examined hundreds of wrongful convictions and determined that roughly 52 percent of the errors resulted from eyewitness mistakes. Legal scholar Edwin Borchard studied 65 cases of "erroneous criminal convictions of innocent people." Mistaken eyewitness identification was responsible for approximately 45 percent of Borchard's case studies.
52 percent of all the innocent people convicted were the result of eyewitness testimony.
It's really interesting to see Daniel treat the testimony of the 11 witnesses as something akin to the apostles going out across the world to spread the Good News after Christ's death. There's just something about these 19th century men being led into a forest by a convicted treasure digger that doesn't seem to convince your average everyday thinking person. Especially when these people were so credulous as to follow Joseph into those same forests looking for ancient caches of gold... which mysteriously never materialized. Tell a thinking person that Joe used the same stone to look for treasure as to translate this 200lb golden book, and the person should be sufficiently inoculated against Mormon emotional manipulation.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... heard.html
