Circumstantial Evidence

[kate_nepveu]

This morning, I was in Rochester to argue two cases. When there are a lot of cases on the calendar before mine, I do my best to pay attention to them: it keeps me awake, it's educational on a number of levels, and I'm not going to be able to concentrate on my own case during other people's arguments (I prepare ferociously ahead of time instead). Today, I was rewarded with an interesting set of facts, which I believe went something like this:

Criminal conviction for drug possession. Defendant had jumped out of a still-running car and run through a series of backyards. He was eventually arrested some distance away (I did not hear any of the distances). A bag of drugs was found on the ground near a fence, which defendant had jumped over; the jumping was the only time the pursuing officer lost sight of defendant. It was a cold snowy day, and there were only two sets of footprints in the backyard, defendant's and the officer's. The bag was warm to the touch.

Is that sufficient evidence to convict defendant of possession? Recall that possession must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

(I think one of the justices said it would make an interesting law school test question.)

Then when I got home, I found myself with another circumstantial evidence question, which amused me. The faucet in the back wall of the house was on. A quick call to Chad confirmed that he hadn't left the water running for some reason, so I went out and turned it off. The faucet turned easily, and there were pieces of icicles on the ground around it. I immediately concluded that a falling icicle had hit the faucet in just the right way to turn it on—which is perhaps somewhat more improbable than the case I heard this morning, but since the stakes are so much lower, I am perfectly happy to accept it.

Do you all have any interesting examples of circumstantial evidence? Or want to weigh in on these examples?

(Note to self: find a "lawyerly" icon.)

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I use circumstantial evidence frequently when trying to debug software problems. I've gotten particularly good at guessing the cause of a graphics bug just by eyeballing the crazy garbage on the screen.

It doesn't always work. If I can make intuitive leaps five or six steps ahead of what I can prove, I can often diagnose and fix bugs much faster than with a systematic approach to isolating the trouble--of course, I have to do some experiments to verify that I made the right guess. But every so often, I get burned by this approach, because I made a wrong assumption about how the code works or because a coincidence mimicked what I thought was significant. Then, I have to back up and proceed by more methodical baby steps, verifying every step in my deduction--and of course the whole process takes longer than if I had started with this approach in the first place. So there's an art to finding the optimum mix of provable deduction and intuitive induction from circumstantial evidence.

[kate_nepveu]

I used to find myself doing a lot of intuitive leaps when doing proofs or similar things--I could see how to get where I was going, but I couldn't have told you how.