Evidence to Convict?

[RoadRunner79]

No... not taking anything away from the matter.   It was just a re-cap.
I think that it is intriguing , that you said the only people who know the truth  of the matter is the other witnesses and myself.  Can the witnesses not transfer this truth of the matter to others through testimony?

Yes they can. It's just not possible to know if they are correct and truthful without evidence to support that. The testimony is the claim. Evidence is the body of facts that support or undermine the claim. Going through life taking everyone's word for everything will land you in trouble.

  I would assume that if there was DNA evidence, I don't witness these facts first hand, but rely on the testimony (either documents or expert testimony) in court to relay this information. Why can't the same be done with testimony?    Are you saying that my testimony in confessing to the crime would be evidence, whereas anyone else who saw is somehow not evidence?  Couldn't someone just bring up the false convictions based on confessions?

Sigh. The testimony is the claim. The evidence is what makes you justified in accepting it as accurate. People give false confessions all the time. Police interrogations are practically designed to elicit them. Plenty of people have been falsely convicted based on their own confessions.

'I beat Joe with a chair' is a claim. If I did, in fact, beat Joe with a chair; the evidence should support that claim: Joe should show signs of being beaten, the chair should show signs of being used to beat someone, and my story should hold up under cross examination and investigation of the circumstances, nothing found that would motivate me to claim I beat Joe when I didn't, no one says I was somewhere else when it happened, etc. I should be convicted if no evidence is found to exonerate me despite my confession. It makes a difference if the confession was freely given or obtained by interrogation.

Why is this so hard for you? It's like you have some motivation to not be able to get the difference between a claim and evidence for or against a claim.

Thanks,   I do share some of your concerns, but come to a different conclusion.  I think that those testifying that someone hit Joe over the head with a chair, is similar to an expert testifying that this someones DNA was on the chair.  One is testifying to what the tests result where, the other is testifying to what they had seen.  Are these both just claims and not evidence?  Does a person need to see for themselves, in order for it to be considered evidence? 

I would have preferred for someone else to start a thread (because when I do, my motives seem to need to be questioned).  But it does seem like people are interested in discussing and I am thinking, that I might do so (and do better to just ignore the trolls this time).