Wiarygodność zeznań świadka. Niektóre problemy logiczne
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Date
1984
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Wydział Prawa i Administracji UAM
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Credibility of witness'es testimony. Some logical problems
Abstract
The article discussess two problems of great importance for a judicial practice:
1) conception of reliability of a informant, 2) partial reliability of the evidentiary
statement.
Two notions of „witness'es credibility" can be differentiated in the judicial
practice, although judges are not always aware of that distinction. A type of facts
which are foundation for a statement of reasons for the judgement is adopted
as a criterion of that distinction. Consequently, one witness is found to be credible,
while another is not:
1. a notion of credibility is of a reporting character, the judge finds that a given
witness is credible with reference to relations on certain facts, as almost all of his
information appeared to be true (mistakes were commuted rarely) and he supplied
mny information from a given field. The notion of credibility1 is thus related to
frequency of false and true information;
2. a notion of credibility2 has a prognostic character; data related to withness'es
attitude, his personality, views, traits of character, knowledge (of facts reported),
and situation he was in at the time of percepting facts (or at receiving information
in some other way) are a foundation of judicial decision of his credibility.
If the court is supplied with a certain amount of information on a witness and
his testimony, and they are relevant with reference to a given event (e.g. a crime),
the witness will be credible only when:
1. frequence of his mistakes and concealments with reference to that event is
not exceeding a certain constant adopted by court and defining a level of its
critical judgement towards the witness and his testimony;
2. mistakes and concealments of the witness are unintentional.
Irrespective of defining credibility of the witness, the court has to be supplied
with a satisfactory amount of information on the witness as well as with his
testimony of a substantial duration to be able to estimate his reliability.
The notion of credibility of the witness is also used in courts in two different
meanings:
1. upon indicating that „the witness is credible", the court relates to the value
of the very testimony. Consequently it means a total acceptance of the testimony
or its dismission. . -
2. the expression mentioned above can also be a mental abridgement to the
effect that credibility of the given witness is in p r i n c i p l e adopted by court,
although a question of some statements of the witness may be not settled. In
other words, credibility of all the statements separately is examined by court.
It does not seem advisable to require from court to offer a total, univocal
estimation of the whole of witness'es testimony (point 1). In the result his evidence
could be found either totally credible or totally unreliable.
In most of the cases, the said testimony is not a single statement of a fact
formulated in a simple sentence, but usually it adopts a form of a set of various
statements. It can be therefore indicated that a court can make its findings-without
a breach of principles of logics-contrary to the testimony of witness who was found
credible in principle and vice versa.
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Citation
Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny 46, 1984, z. 2, s. 157-169
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ISBN
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0035-9629