ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Acceptable Murder (3/4/2009 1:58:47 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: truckinslave Your post is illustrative of some of the confusion prevailing on this subject- and I truly do NOT mean that in any way disparagingly. Let's start with an examination of your premise- that DNA evidence can prove an eyewitness is mistaken. I can imagine one circumstance under which that premise can almost be true. 1. Witness saw a suspect running away bleeding from his arm. 2. Witness picked a suspect from a lineup. 3. DNA revealed the blood recovered at the scene did not belong to the suspect. That's the strongest realistic scenario that I can think of, quickly, to support the idea of DNA evidence disproving eyewitness tetimony. But the possibility remains that the suspect committed the crime, and staged the bleeding arm as part of a frame-up using someone else's blood. It should be clear to any intelligent person that the relatively smart criminals of the future will as a matter of routine plant false DNA evidence. In our above scenario, the DNA evidence conflicts with the eyewitness testimony but does not disprove it. Conflicting evidence and conflicting testimony are matters for the judgement of the jury. Most if not all criminal trials involve jury resolution of such conflicts. What has normally happened in the cases so revered by Sheck (sic?) and his ilk are much more easily explained. The presence of a DNA sample, recovered at the crime scene, that does not match that of the convicted man, proves only, and I do mean only, that someone else was present. May have been an accomplice, may have been an innocent person, may have been there before, during, or after the commission of the crime in question; but that's it. DNA evidence does not and cannot conceivably, imo, prove innocence. No worries, I didn't take what you said disparagingly at all. But I can think of lots of scenarios in which your reasoning would not hold up. For example, a rape in which the victim adamantly insists there was only one attacker, and she makes an eye-witness identification of a suspect. But the suspect's DNA clearly does not match the DNA of the person whose semen was collected from the victim. So, something doesn't fit. Either she's wrong about the number of people who raped her, she's wrong about the identity of the one who did, or the DNA test is wrong. At least one of those things is clearly wrong. Most likely her identification of the rapist. Ask any cop or criminal attorney, and 9 out of 10 of them will tell you that eye-witness identification of a stranger is notoriously unreliable, far less reliable than DNA tests. I could think of an infinite number of similar scenarios, but there wouldn't be any point in it. The point is, DNA evidence in and of itself doesn't have to directly and incontrovertibly prove that someone is innocent; it only has to make the eyewitness testimony (or whatever evidence) seem unlikely enough that there is suddenly a reasonable doubt that the suspect is guilty. And that's what it's all about, a reasonable doubt. Do you seriously think that your hypothetical scenario in which a criminal plans a crime, collects a blood sample from an innocent person, cuts his own arm, then splatters the innocent person's blood at the scene while running away is reasonably more likely than the possibility that the suspect with the cut on his arm and the DNA matching the blood at the scene is the guy who committed the crime? I find it hard to believe you do. And having served on juries in criminal trials, I can guarantee you no jury in their right mind would. In order to get their defendant off, the attorney needs to prove not that it could possibly have happened that way, but that it's reasonable to believe that it did. That theory, without any supporting evidence, would be discussed for about 3 minutes, tops, in the jury room before being tossed aside once and for all. DNA evidence is not the be all and end all of criminal justice, but it's a lot more useful and a lot more reliable than you seem to give it credit for. Generally far more so than eyewitness identifications, if and when they match up head to head.
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