How do you reconcile conflicting witness accounts and timelines?
Do you favor a testimony based on your trust level of the person? Based on how close they were to the event? How much their recollection of events changed over time? How soon after the event their recollection was recorded?
I am curious to know how other people think.
I can go first:
1. I think a witness who is not lying will give a genuine account of an event.
The more mundane the event (in the moment), the less the witness is in a heightened state of alertness though, and accuracy can be off despite their best effort.
They can also have poor eye sight, be medicated, might have had a drink or two, etc.
All in all, unless the witness is purposely lying, these early eye witness accounts hold a lot of weight, even with room for human errors factored in.
2. Additional information learnt at a later point about the event they witnessed contaminates the purity of what they actually saw or didn’t see.
3. Being asked to repeat their account over and over, in my opinion further dilutes accuracy. After a while, some people will just be reluctantly repeating a memorization of the memory, rather than recalling the event itself. As time goes on, their answers become more and more rehearsed and less and less factual.
- If a witness is not being honest, the above doesn’t mean anything. They know exactly what it is they are not saying and will alter the truth to guard their secret. But their own memory of the truth is very, very accurate.
I am curious how others' minds work conflicting testimony