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Testimony Definition in Criminal Law

2 grudnia 2022 0

One way to avoid the paradox of conjunction is to take the position that it should not be enough for each element to cross the probabilistic threshold. The applicant (or prosecutor) should only win if the likelihood of the applicant`s case (or the prosecutor`s office) as a whole exceeds the applicable probability threshold. In our example, the applicant should lose because the overall probability is less than 0.5. But the proposed solution is not satisfactory. The overall likelihood required would then depend on the number of elements of the civil suit or criminal charge. The higher the number of elements, the greater the probability up to which, on average, each of them must be proven. This is considered arbitrary and therefore reprehensible. As two commentators have noted, the legal definition of theft contains more elements than murder. Criminal law is not the same in all countries. We can take the following as a convenient approximation of what the law is in some countries: murder is (1) an act that caused the death of a person, (2) that was committed with intent to cause death, and to constitute theft, there must be (1) an intent to take property, (2) dishonesty in the removal of property, (3) removal of property from the possession of another person, and (4) lack of consent of that person. Since the offence of theft contains twice as many elements as murder, the individual elements of theft should be proven with a much higher probability (so that the probability of their connection exceeds the overall threshold) than the individual elements for the much more serious crime of murder (Allen and Leiter 2001: 1504-5). This is intuitively unacceptable.

Experts are called upon to provide expertise on specific topics that are not the ordinary knowledge of a jury or judge. Experts often include psychiatrists and psychologists, therapists, doctors, forensic scientists, and writing experts. Evidence presented by experts in criminal procedure is accepted by the court as reliable testimony because it is based on proven facts supported by scientific research, published studies and professional experience. Stephen (1872: 3-4, 6-7) noted long ago that the legal use of the term „evidence” is ambiguous. It sometimes refers to what is presented by a party to the trial as a means of establishing factual allegations. („Evidence” is the legal term for the presentation or presentation of evidence in court for the purpose of presenting evidence.) This importance of proof is reflected in the section on definitions in the Indian Evidence Act (Stephen 1872:149). [3] When lawyers use the term „evidence” in this way, they have in mind what epistemologists would mean by „objects of sensory evidence” (Haack 2004: 48). In this sense, evidence is generally divided into three main categories:[4] oral evidence (testimony before the court), documentary evidence (documents submitted to court inspection) and „authentic evidence”; The first two are explicit and the third encompasses things other than documents such as a knife allegedly used to commit a crime. One of the main purposes of using the adjective „logical” is to indicate the non-legal nature of relevance.

As Thayer (1898:269) has argued, relevance is „a matter of logic, not law.” This is not to say that relevance does not have a legal dimension. The law distinguishes between questions of law and questions of fact. A relevant question raises a question of law that is for the judge, not the jury, to decide, and to the extent that relevance is defined in the sources of law (e.g., in the Federal Rule of Evidence 401 noted above), the judge must respect the legal definition. But the legal definitions of relevance are, without exception, very broad. Relevance is a logical, not a legal, concept in the sense that, in order to answer a question of relevance and apply the definition of relevance, the judge must necessarily rely on extrajudicial means and is not bound by precedent. Returning to Federal Rule of Evidence 401, it generally states that evidence is relevant when it „tends to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” To decide whether the evidence to be presented demonstrates this tendency, the judge must look beyond the law. Thayer insisted. As he said, „There is no relevance test in the law. For this he tacitly refers to logic and general experience” (Thayer 1898:265). The fact that the defendant`s preferred colour is blue is, barring exceptional circumstances, irrelevant to the question of his intention to steal. It is not the law that tells us this, but „logic and general experience”.

According to Thayer, the law does not control or regulate the assessment of relevance; It assumes that judges already have the (reasonable) resources to carry out this assessment. In court proceedings, witnesses are key elements of a case and can help prove the innocence or guilt of an accused. In criminal and civil cases, witnesses are often summoned to court by summons from the defence lawyer or prosecutor. In criminal cases, there are three types of witnesses who are summoned to appear in a trial. This includes eyewitnesses, experts and character witnesses. Third, although the Bayesian theorem provides a method for updating probabilities in light of new evidence, it is silent on what the initial probability should be. In a trial, the initial probability cannot be zeroed, as this means the certainty of the innocence of the accused.

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