A Government Professor at an unnamed university was teaching "American Constitutional Development" in a lecture hall with upwards of 100 students, right after lunch TTh.jmra wrote:I find the victims statement a little hard to buy into. Remember, one of the victims interviewed at the Navy Yard shooting claimed to have seen the shooter carrying an AR15. Of course we know from the videos that it was a shotgun.jimlongley wrote:On the news tonight, the "shooter" says that his gun didn't malfunction, "it just wasn't cocked." and the one of the victims says that the "shooter" pulled the trigger five times because he heard the clicks.
If it wasn't cocked, one has to wonder how it fired outside, and if it was a semi-auto, which the videos show, one has to wonder what all the clicking was, do Glocks do that? Or maybe it was a DA semi-auto.
Given how often "eyewitness" accounts are proven to be grossly inaccurate, it's amazing that such testimony is weighted so heavily in trials.
I've heard of studies where a group of people were shown a video clip and then asked to write down their version of what happened. Another group was then asked to sort the papers putting like stories together. The end result was papers that the second group felt were completely unrelated to the others.
About midway through one lecture, the door opened, a man ran in, stuck a gun in the Professor's ribs, and demanded his wallet. The professor, cowering in fear, shakily got out his wallet and handed it over. The man ran out the door.
The professor told everyone to write down what (s)he had seen. When that was accomplished, he collected the descriptions and accounts, and went to the door and invited the gunman to come back in.
The "gun" the man had menaced the professor with was actually a banana. Nobody could imagine handing over a wallet to a man brandishing a banana, so it had to be a gun, right?
Descriptions of the gunman ran all over the place, tall medium height, blonde, brown, dark hair, long, short, blue jeans, slacks, collared shirt, t-shirt, a revolver, a SA, blue steel, chromed, large, small, etc. Completely worthless.
Trial lawyers love or hate eye witness testimony. They are the least reliable of all forms of evidence, generally. OTOH, "an eye-witness always ruins a good story" so if it's your eye-witness who ruins the other guy's story, well, OK!