Witness Testimony

Abstract

Chapter 4 turns to witness reliability. Juries attach great weight to testimony and yet witness’s accounts can be highly unreliable. An initial concern is that demeanour may give an unjustified impression of accuracy. The law also limits the situations where witnesses can present hearsay evidence – on the basis that it cannot be adequately tested – and the Chapter will review the exceptions to this rule and ask whether they compromise establishing the truth. Identification evidence is notoriously fallible and, it has been suggested, leads to a high proportion of miscarriages of justice. This links more generally into issues of memory; of how facts are processed at times of stress, and of how they are subsequently recalled in another stressful environment.