Require response to hearsay

Revision as of 20:40, 3 July 2004 by 142.177.99.42 (talk) (GFDL text via Recyclopedia.info)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

To require response to hearsay is a harassment and social exclusion technique. When carried out in public it is propaganda. It takes the general form:

  • "X says you said or did Y, what do you have to say about that?"

If there is any consequence whatsoever for failing to respond, this method is in play. Two good examples include:

Incidents like this render due process ultimately ineffective by rendering parties hostile to it, and uninterested in further debate about such claims - which will almost certainly simply extend the hearsay or any lying or justifying of the interpretation, and thus exclude the party so accussed.

This is a basic violation of presumption of innocence - thus this practice is banned in all legal codes. Jury instructions by judges always include instructions to discard hearsay and judges do their best to ensure it does not appear in evidence, even if evidence discovered due to it, does.

The prohibition against self-incrimination is for parallel reasons: only one party is accused and questioned at one time, thus any decision to pursue that individual carries a strong confirmation bias towards that one's guilt: the committee wants to believe it is right to be questioning that person, and no one else, and it wants to end the matter and appear competent. These urges alone quite commonly lead to torture in many modern countries.