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| This is one of a series of posts discussing what the FIFA case might tell us about the American criminal justice system. Click here for the introduction, and here for "Part 1: Pretrial Publicity."As the FIFA case develops, we'll continue to hear more about what happened--who fifa coins did what, and who knew what was going on. We've already seen the indictment, which sets forth a series of accusations based on the evidence presented to the grand jury. We've heard about certain defendants' guilty pleas, with the accompanying factual admissions; more such pleas and admissions are virtually certain to come. If any cases proceed to trial, we'll hear about in-court testimony and the resulting verdicts.At the end of this process, we'll have a pretty comprehensive account of the FIFA story. We may instinctively treat that account as being factual, objective, and reliable--the equivalent of, for example, a trustworthy reporter's story about an event that she personally observed. Will that reliance be justified? Will that ultimate narrative be something we can trust? I have serious doubts.At the outset, it's worth remembering that any factual account from a witness is just that--a human being's statement about what happened. (There will also, of course, be documents and other tangible evidence, but these documents never tell the whole story; this is why the government relies so heavily on witness testimony.) With any such statement, we obviously have to account for the possibility of not only honest perception or memory errors, but also deliberate deception. In particular, the witnesses interviewed early on in a criminal investigation are often those with some reason to be less then entirely forthcoming. They may themselves be suspects, or may be close enough to the alleged conduct that they know they could easily become suspects. They may ultimate team coins have positive or negative relationships with the investigation's targets, giving them an incentive to direct attention toward or away from certain persons. And this is where it gets worse. At some point, often very early on, government agents will form opinions about what actually happened. This may be based on their preexisting expectations of what they would find, or on the accounts they have heard in their initial interviews. |
we obviously have to account for the possibility
