Mostly a shit post. Still after watching court dramas and remembering in civics talking about how supernatural explanations are difficult to use as reasonable doubt. What would happen if supernatural entities were proven a fact?
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I imagine it would depend on how exactly they were proven, and what they could be proven to do. If you prove the existence of the kind of ghost that makes smudges in photographs, that opens up very different lines than if you prove the existence of the kind of ghost that can physically move objects around, or possess people, and so on. I imagine certain groups might start grifting in that area (looking at you, The Innocence Project), but with the exception of some very specific cases, and again depending on what exactly the entities did, I don’t expect we’d see mass reopenings or reevaluations of completed trials. One issue here is that one must assume that whatever is proven to exist is so tenuous and so rare that it couldn’t be proven to exist, despite many, many people trying for many many years, until now, which in turn implies that it probably wouldn’t be relevant in the vast majority of cases.
I do predict we’d see a massive spike in people trying to use the new discovery as an excuse in future crimes. There might even be a small uptick in crime overall as people decide “maybe I can get away with [something] by blaming the ghosts.” Hopefully, whatever allowed for the proving of the supernatural would also allow for the disproving of such excuses.
I guess I'm asking how much would reasonable doubt stretch if supernatural explanations were possible.
There’s just such a range of what’s considered supernatural that it’s hard to know without narrowing the scope. Possession, obviously, would be huge, if that’s on the table. Any sudden, surprising violence is suddenly “a ghost made me do it.” Or maybe it was a skinwalker impersonating you? An evil alien clone? The volcano god demanded a sacrifice? A poltergeist hit the accelerator instead of the brakes? Perhaps a psychic vision proves you killed a future Hitler! If the whole gamut of alleged supernatural phenomena is open, I don’t think you could find a single crime that can’t be blamed on or excused by it it somehow.
It really comes down to what exactly has been proven and how it behaves.