The main problem with an eyewitness account of any event is reliability. Whether someone witnesses a homicide, car wreck, plane crash, or whether someone catches his mate in bed with someone else and they scream, “It isn’t what it looks like.” or whether someone claims to see an extraterrestrial spacecraft with a bunch of ET’s crawling all over it trying to repair a malfunction, reliability is the issue with personal testimony. It doesn’t mean that a personal testimony is a false one. It does not mean that when the milkman takes the witness stand in a court of law and says he saw Mr. Jones throw his wife’s mother from the third story bedroom that he is lying. Mr. Jones’ mother-in-law could have fallen out the window and Mr. Jones was trying to catch her before falling. Perspective is everything.
Multiple variables can affect the reliability of an eyewitness account. Whether the testifier is man or woman, child or adult, different worldviews through which interpretations are made, emotions, stress, authority figures like police, or even the age of the person telling the story can affect reliability.
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