liz3564 wrote:...
I am going on much more than heresay. You two, particularly you, Drifting, should know me better than that ...
People on this board quite frequently accuse one another of relying on hearsay to make their case. But that term as used here seems frequently to mean no more than 'gossip', 'tittle-tattle' or 'scuttlebutt'.
Now all words in a living language tend to have a hard core and fuzzy edges. the fuzzy edges may of course harden up as time passes, and the core may change. But for the moment the hard core of 'hearsay' is a legal concept, the idea that a judge ought not in general to admit as evidence a statement by person X about what he
heard person Y
say about some matter under dispute. (Like all rules, this has exceptions, but the principle is clear.)
So this is OK as evidence from a witness on the stand if John Doe is charged with killing a policemen:
(1) "I saw John Doe stab the officer".
This is not:
(2) "I heard Hank Smith say that he had seen John Doe stab the officer."
The reason why the second statement generally cannot be admitted as evidence is that whereas John Doe's defense attorney can cross-examine the person who makes statement (1) ("Did you actually see a knife in Doe's hand, or might he just have been punching the officer?" and so on), in case (2) Hank Smith is not on the stand and cannot be cross-examined about the facts of the assault. On occasion, this rule may protect a suspect who almost certainly committed a crime. But the Anglo-Saxon tradition of jurisprudence generally prefers the risk of acquitting the guilty over the risk of convicting the innocent. We are after all talking about locking people up, maybe even executing them.
Now in the present case, it seems that Liz may be able to say:
"Someone told me that they had been present at the relevant time and that they had seen Darrick do the things that have been ascribed to him." That is hearsay in the sense outlined above. To say that does not mean that the account given by Liz's informant is wrong, and it certainly does not amount to an accusation that Liz is passing on unreliable gossip. In the practical affairs of life, hearsay may be all we have to go on, and in such affairs we frequently have to act on the basis of a standard of proof that would not earn an accused a single day in jail. But everyday life (or a discussion of banning someone from a message board) is not a criminal trial, is it?
Liz may be relying on hearsay. But even if she is, that hearsay may give a reasonable basis for banning someone from the board.
