I was a witness to a crime that led to a short police chase and a police shooting, and I couldn't accurately describe which direction the car was facing when it passed me (reversing or forward).
Up until that point I'd have thought I would be a reliable witness (I didn't, but this proved it definitively!)
I actually have a very similar story. When I was younger, I was witness to a pretty bad car accident, and I gave them my information, and was later subpoenaed as a witness. Before going, I thought I had a pretty good recollection of the event -- it happened right in front of me. When I got there, I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going.
It was really eye-opening for me. Thinking about it is still kind of eerie. I remember the accident. I can see it in my head. But apparently the memory is not exactly correct.
You were bamboozled by a clever attorney or made to look like an idiot by an incompetent one.
I served on a jury where an attractive, sharp defense attorney just ripped a witness to shreds. The person testifying was a customer engineer who installed and repaired a particular piece of equipment, whose entire function was dependent on time. He was testifying about what he did every day, not some nuance about direction of travel.
She built the poor guy up and then threw him off a cliff. At the end he ended up testifying that time is impossible to accurately measure. The issue was pretty obvious - the incompetent DAs didn’t prepare the witness for cross examination.
In my case, it was just one single simple question about pointing out the direction the car was coming from and going to on a diagram of the intersection.
There was nothing clever about the question. Maybe they had a few up their sleeve for subsequent questions, but we never got that far, as I was immediately dismissed. I spent maybe 60 seconds in the courtroom.
It really was a case of casual observer not having useful information. Just because I saw and heard the impact doesn’t mean that noticed any of the details that would have made a difference to anyone.
> I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going.
Presumably lawyers are very good at finding exactly the right questions to ask to exploit the weaknesses of human memory and make a witness look unreliable.
