Hmmm. When I mention witnesses, I get told witness testimony is unreliable.
Is that because the witnesses in the Bible are not "experts" but backward liars? That's confusing.
There are differences between expert witnesses and eyewitnesses in courts.
Eyewitnesses are only recounting their stories of what they have seen and/or what they have heard from their respective perspectives.
You can have 10 eyewitnesses in a scene of an armed robbery, for example, and their accounts can vary widely especially if there were more than 1 armed robber, partly because people generally are not good at observations when they are under pressures and partly because fears can paralyze people seeing clearly and objectively, hence eyewitnesses are not reliable. Especially if the robbery resulted in injuries, or worse, someone or simple people were killed in the robbery.
Expert witnesses are not relying on the eyewitnesses’ accounts, but on forensics who take whatever evidence available are there, and if there is a body or more, medical examiner would examine how they were killed and again forensics could identify precisely what weapon were used.
Expert witnesses, like the coroner and forensic team, will provide the data of any evidence that are available.
Expert witnesses provide more objective testimonies because they are only relying on the evidence.
The jury and judge will decide on all testimonies, both eyewitnesses and expert witnesses, if any of the robbers are standing trial.
The problems with eyewitnesses, are that some can people have been known to shut down, when under great pressures and duress.
Plus, their (eyewitnesses’) stories can also change, from the time of the police interviews to time of the trial. And often the defendant’s lawyer(s) will often use their unreliability and trip witnesses during cross examination.
As you can see, having eyewitnesses there, won’t necessarily mean they will be accurate when the time come for the trial to prosecute the robbers.