Witness Evidence

[RoadRunner79]

Thank you again, for your responses (I do appreciate thougthful responses for consideration).  As I said previously, I will review the studies provided, and provide some comments about them (this will take a few days).  I'm also fighting my first inclination for some of the posts, so I'm holding off saying too much for a day or so.

But in the meantime; here is a letter written to a blog where some similar discussions where going on.
http://randalrauser.com/2013/12/rd-miksa...testimony/

I am writing you today because as a regular “lurker” at your blog, I was dismayed at certain comments posted recently in reply to your blog posts concerning the topic of eye-witness reliability and the evidentiary value of eye-witness testimony. As an individual who has worked for most of his professional life in real-life fields that depend heavily on eye-witness testimony and which make serious decisions based on such testimony (Intelligence and Policing), I was indeed shocked at the generally poor understanding and misconceptions that many of your commentators expressed when they were discussing the issue of eye-witness testimony.

when discussing the issue of eye-witness testimony in a legal context—made the claim that we very often hear that scientific evidence, in the form of forensic evidence such as DNA, overturns eye-witness testimony. Indeed, the commentator then seemed to infer that courts thus favor scientific evidence over testimonial evidence in many instances. And yet this claim is not only mistaken as a general principle, but it fails to take into account the vastly greatly number of times that eye-witness testimony overrules scientific evidence in a legal setting.

To understand why, we first have to understand that eye-witness testimony, while still remaining eye-witness testimony, varies greatly in terms of quality. For example, there is a big difference in the quality of eye-witness testimony between 1) a group of people who see, at night and in a poorly lit area, an unknown man stabbing another unknown man when compared to 2) a group of people who walk in on a family friend, whom they have known for twenty-years, stabbing his wife (who they also know) in the well-lit living room of his house. Obviously, the eye-witness testimony in the latter case is of better quality than in the former case, and yet in both cases it is still eye-witness testimony.

Yet what this means is that while a court may assess forensic evidence of a certain sort to be sufficient to establish reasonable doubt in the eye-witness testimony in the first case, it would never do so in the latter case. Indeed, if, for example, it was somehow discovered that the fingerprints of the family friend were not on the knife that was used to stab his wife, but rather that the fingerprints of another man were on the knife, do you think that that fact would in any way be sufficient to override the eye-witness testimony provided of the murder by the group of people that walked in on him as he was stabbing his wife in the living room? Of course not. This strange forensic fact would simply be viewed as one of the anomalies that sometimes occurs with forensic evidence in criminal cases. But it would never be sufficient, in and of itself, to create reasonable doubt in the face of the eye-witness testimony provided by a group of people who clearly saw a family friend murder his wife.

More examples in the article...

While not as critical (as policing /intelligence)  in my occupation working with machine controls, I do find myself relying on the observations of others, to help me find the cause of the issue. I also rely on my own observation of what I see and hear quite often as well.   So my own experience doesn't match with what some infer as to the reliability of testimony.