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Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
How do you quantify 4 years of your life taken away by the courts and state? The girl lied but at the end of the day it was the court's decision to assume him guilty based soley on word of mouth. Blame should be spread around here. Is there a president for this type of thing?
Is it me or should the judge not be disciplined as there is admittance that a decision was based on eye contact and doing what you think is right? Basically saying a good liar will trump an innocent victim that's not a great in front of an audience? Flip a coin because of eye contact? That's a horrible addmitance of incompetance IMO.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Super Nintendo Chalmers
You're never going to remove that from a system that relies on judges and juries. Everyone has their biases. It's why defendants get a haircut and wear their Sunday best when they go to court.
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Yup. Our entire justice system is predicated on the assumption that the best evidence is oral evidence given under oath by witnesses to the events in question, and that trial judges are the best judges of a witness' credibility.
Unfortunately, it has been demonstrated time and time again that witnesses - particularly eye witnesses - are horribly unreliable, and that people are generally terrible at determining whether someone is lying or not. So, really, our trial system is based on a foundation that is known to be shaky.
On the bright side, in Canada at least, the courts have an acquittal bias: they lean towards acquitting people who are most likely guilty, rather than towards convicting people who are quite possibly innocent. That's why you see so many more stories about our weak-kneed justice system, rather than our harsh and punitive justice system.