Do witnesses lie in court?

Courts are interesting because lieing is something that is expected to occur. As part of the jury instructions, we were advised on how to evaluate the testimony of the witnesses. Essentially the testimony could be believed, not believed, or only partly believed. I found this extremely interesting because we all have the expectation that people should be compelled to tell the truth through oath or perjury charges.

We were encouraged not to bring our presumptions into the court room, but that can be difficult. There were people who drive the intersection in question every day and wanted to bring their own analysis into the discussion. There was one who assumed that the accused was a drug addict because they had a brother in a similar situation. One person assumed that the police officer, a new member of the force, had a lot to gain by getting a conviction on his record while another thought that because the Marin County's Sherriff's department rarely cites traffic violations, it would be ridiculous for the deputy to lie. The point is that we have no idea of whether someone is lieing or not. We can never know unless we catch them in a blatant lie on the witness stand.

In our case, there was very little definitive evidence for either party. The accussed and the police officer were the only witnesses. The evidence offered to the jury for review was a map of the alleged crime scene (from prosecution), pictures of the alleged crime scene (from defense), and DMV documents (from prosecution).

We struggled in the jury room debating the nature of "who to believe" because we thought the case was about which story would we believe. Over time, we began to realize that it would be too difficult to find out who was more believable from the testimony that we received. Instead, we began to assemble the parts of both witnesses stories that were in alignment. Through this process, we were actually able to gain a clearer picture of what occurred because we were able to use the consistencies in testimony to determine what definitely occured while analyzing the evidence provided to fill in the gaps.

Analysis of the facts brought the group into alignment because we based decisions on the facts, no matter how hard it was to put aside our assumptions. We did a good job in the analysis and ultimately made the right decision using both the testimony of the witnesses and the evidence presented.