It is a Fact Long established...
Dec. 5th, 2018 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unseenlibrarian…in American jurisprudence that ghostly testimony cannot be the sole evidence of guilt for a crime, going back to the days before there -was- American jurisprudence. Even the well-known case of the Greenbriar Ghost relied on the ghost’s mother convincing an attorney outside of the courtroom of the need for further investigation.
The ability to speak to ghosts thus does not make one a good detective. You still need to do all the same legwork, gather all the same evidence, and, well, ghosts are no more reliable a witness and just as subject to petty motivations as the living, so you can’t trust them any more than human eyewitnesses.
But there’s no rule that they can’t point you in a new direction in a stalled case. They might have knowledge of a motive, or a new point of view on existing evidence, or even point you at a relationship you didn’t previously know about that changes your perspective on a case.
Of course, you have to be very careful as to how you present this new-found twist in your investigation. The skill most spiritualist detectives develop is a finely honed sense of just how to sell a judge on the need for a search warrant based on a ghost telling them about the murder weapon.
The ability to speak to ghosts thus does not make one a good detective. You still need to do all the same legwork, gather all the same evidence, and, well, ghosts are no more reliable a witness and just as subject to petty motivations as the living, so you can’t trust them any more than human eyewitnesses.
But there’s no rule that they can’t point you in a new direction in a stalled case. They might have knowledge of a motive, or a new point of view on existing evidence, or even point you at a relationship you didn’t previously know about that changes your perspective on a case.
Of course, you have to be very careful as to how you present this new-found twist in your investigation. The skill most spiritualist detectives develop is a finely honed sense of just how to sell a judge on the need for a search warrant based on a ghost telling them about the murder weapon.
