Monday, September 17, 2007
Witnesses
Throughout the day today, something that Mr. Lazarow said kept ringing in my mind. It was along the lines of, "If110,000 people are watching a game, then everyone sees a different game since no one sits in the same seat, sees the same things, etc." It's hard to think of our conception of the world as completely unique to each individual. But I wondered- how trustworthy is the justice system in its capacity to judge a person or group? We have all heard "Innocent until proven guilty," but how can one be judged guilty or innocent? Surely, we can use DNA and such evidence that so-and-so committed some crime, but what about witnesses? Each witness observes something completely different; how can be sure that what they're stating is what actually occurred?
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2 comments:
I think the simple answer is that we cannot possibly be 100% sure of anything. Mr. Laz told us in class, and I quite agree that there are no absolute truths. Life as we know it is organized chaos and we deal with it as justly as we can. It really is a miracle that we can agree on anything, seeing as our perspectives are blurred by our individual experience.
-Paige
Hey, it's Erin. I think that Ian brought up an interesting point. One thing that I can relate it to is the movie (an old one) 12 Angry Men. It is about a jury having to reach a verdict in a case where a boy is said to have killed his father. There are two witnesses presented by the prosecution, but during the course of the movie their testimonies are proven inconsistent or erroneous. The people didn't lie; but the way they said things happened might not have been accurate. This is true of anything.
For example, you hear a door shut. Someone might have come in, but then again someone might have gone out. Or other times, something said or done previously takes on a new significance when you look back on it. When I'm watching a murder mystery and someone says, "I'll kill you", I know who's going to get killed and who's going to be blamed. I think hindsight affects how events are seen. We can't relate events exactly how they happened, or conversations exactly word for word. Since no two people experience the same thing the same way, it's so suspicious if two people's testimonies are exactly alike. It's kind of like circumstantial evidence and I think that a jury needs to view it as such when deliberating.
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