Four Ways An Eyewitness Can Help An Accident Attorney
When it comes to contentious legal battles, an eyewitness can be a big resource. If you are involved in an accident case and want to better understand the role of eyewitness testimony, here are some key ways that having somebody on the scene can help your case in court.
The Extent of Injuries
The extent of someone's injuries is often a leading cause of controversy in an accident case. There's a lot of "he said, she said" going around. One obvious reason is the economic incentive to exaggerate injuries. Someone might hit someone in a car accident with a very small impact, -- say, while backing up in a parallel parked space -- and someone else will claim to have the extensive soft tissue damage or other injuries. By the same token, someone can actually have extensive injuries, where a defense lawyer is trying to knock down this case by questioning the extent of what happened. Eyewitnesses can certainly be instructive in this area of accident case law.
Supplementing Police Reports
In a lot of cases, a police report is taken as a gold standard, but in reality, it's very much influenced by who was speaking to an officer or other law enforcement personnel at the time of the accident. In some cases, police reports can be quite skewed. Eyewitnesses can come back after the fact and talk more clearly about what happened at the scene, where a police report may not provide the whole picture.
Trajectories and Impact
In the above case of an auto accident, eyewitnesses can be extremely important in showing how fast vehicles were going, and how an accident happened. But this kind of testimony isn't just important in auto accidents. It's important, for example, in accidents where someone used a machine or piece of equipment to generate impact, or simply assaulted someone with their fists.
Cause and Intent
Chains of cause and effect can be difficult to work out in the greater context of an accident case. What was happening around the time of the accident? Sometimes it can even be tough to identify the single factor causing the impact.
At the same time, eyewitnesses can help to confirm intent. They can testify as to what was said by someone, which can have enormous bearing on the accident case in question. What people say often precedes what they do, and can certainly have quite an influence on negligence or inattention to public safety as something that accident attorneys are trying to pinpoint in court.
