13 - Of witnesses

Summary

It is a matter worth pondering in every good legal code just how the credibility of witnesses and proofs of guilt are to be weighed. Every reasonable man can be a witness, anyone, that is, whose ideas are to some degree consistent and whose sentiments are concurrent with those of other men. {{The true measure of his credibility is nothing but his interest in telling or not telling the truth, from which it follows that it is silly to exclude women on the grounds of their weakness, puerile to treat condemned men, because they are dead in law, as if they are dead in fact, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous when they have no interest in lying.}} Therefore, credibility should diminish in proportion to the affection, hate or other close relations which obtain between the witness and the accused. More than one witness is needed, because, so long as one party affirms and the other denies, nothing is certain and the right which every man has to be believed innocent preponderates. A witness's credibility noticeably diminishes as the enormity of the crime or the unlikeliness of its circumstances increase, such as in cases of witchcraft and gratuitous cruelty. It is more likely that several men should lie in a case of witchcraft, because it is more probable that illusion, ignorance or virulent hatred should act on several men than that even one man should exercise a power which God has either not given to or has taken back from every created being.