Brett Kavanaugh's appeals court photo.
I've been fairly quiet on the Brett Kavanaugh hearings for the last couple of days. In all honesty the hearings made me angry enough that I had to walk away from the issue for awhile. There were so many people saying so many things that were completely wrong and I was getting too attached to the issue. So I took most of the weekend off, wrote a couple of other posts and generally took some mental health time.
What was I so angry about? There are many things of course, including the obvious and cynical political maneuverings and the damage the hearings did for relations between men and women, but that wasn't the most disturbing part of it. There is one idea, more than any other, that was expressed that I know is just completely wrong. It's the idea that we should always believe an accuser in sexual assault cases because a person would never forget who assaulted them.
This is not true at all. Indeed, I would say that a 35 year old accusation that has not other corroborating evidence, eyewitness accounts should be given negative value in terms of evidence. Why? Because eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Here's an article from Scientific American that goes through the reasons why and how many people's lives have been ruined because of the unreliable memory of victims and witnesses. People may get assaulted and yet still fail to identify the person who attacked them. And you can find dozens more studies and articles that show the same thing.
There is also The Innocence Project. That charity has gotten many people out of prison with DNA testing and the most common reason they found for wrongful convictions? Eyewitness testimony. About 70% of their cases were prosecutions where eyewitness testimony was the main factor. Without corroborating evidence many men were convicted and imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit. Keep in mind that the level of examination that many of these men got was much more than Judge Kavanaugh has gotten at his hearings.
Of course The Innocence Project was and is a cause celebre for the left. There is an entire cottage industry for getting people out of prison who have been wrongly convicted for crimes based on eyewitness testimony. There have been hundreds of articles, tv shows, books, movies and news programs all saying the same thing. You can't rely on eyewitness testimony alone and if you do you have a high chance of hurting someone who doesn't deserve it.
Indeed, I know all about this because I have a Bachelors in Criminal Justice. This issue was something that was pounded into my head by my lefty professors and I think for once it was to their credit. Not only did that lesson stick with me for my entire life to this point, they were, for once, actually right about something. I think there is scientific consensus that eyewitness testimony is unreliable at best and shouldn't be used as anything other than corroborating evidence.
It is amazing to me how quickly the idea of eyewitness testimony has gone from taboo to absolutely unimpeachable from the left. I think the Brett Kavanaugh hearings is just another example of the left giving up on one of their more treasured principles for obvious political gain, just like they have cracked down on free speech when they realized people were using their 1st amendment rights to criticize them.
Here's the fact of the matter. I don't know if something happened to Dr. Ford or not. She may believe something did and she may believe that Brett Kavanaugh is the person that did it to her. But without anything other than her say, we never should have heard these accusations. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable and has ruined the lives of many innocent people, especially when the memories are so old, and doing so again in the Kavanaugh hearings is a betrayal of what was a core value to the left just a little while ago.
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