El problema psicológico del testimonio no corroborado

Abstract

In this paper I present the results of a study about Costarrican High Court Criminal Judges' use of certain fundamental cognitive strategies when facing uncorroborated testimony of sexually molested children. The paper was organizedin various sections. First, I address the general notion of eyewitness testimony and its intrinsic assessment difficulties. Second, I address the special difficulties associated with the assessments of witness credibility in making guilty judgements based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of children in sexual abuse processions. Third, I propose a conceptual framework for undestanding judges' reasoning strategies when assessing a witness testimony. Specially, I propose that judges use a three-dimensional perceptual frame based on the percived independence, consistency and relevance of the available information. The use of such framework helps judges lower their uncertainty and associated anxiety through maximizing the informativeness of the available evidence. An special case is made about the consequences of using such assessment framework when coping whit the uncorroborated testimony in cases of sexual abuse. In such cases, judges face evidence lacking in independence and consitency information alone. When the only relevance information is available to the judges, they tend to compensate the information deficit by introducing certain uncertainty-reducing arguments (e.g., "the nature of crime") and/or ad hoc premises (e.g., "children never lie about sexual matters") in their reasoning processes. Finally, I present the results of a content analysis of a random selection of judges' written justifications (rationales) for their guilty jugements in sexual abuse cases in wich children offered uncorroborated testimony. Results revealed judges' utilization of four basic justification strategies, name absence of rival hypotheses, fluidity of communication, perceived witness' intention, and appeal to the nature of the crime. Each justification strategy is described, exemplified with judges' actual statements, and critically analyzed. The central thesis of this paper is that judges cope with children's uncorroborated testimony by granting them, a priori, a substantial amount of credibillity, assuming that what a child says is precise and true, unless evidence is presented to the contrary.