Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Somewhere in Tokyo there’s a manga author furiously taking notes on this as the plot line. Three months from now a new manga will hit store shelves:
“I got killed and now I’m the key witness at my own murder trial”
I think that’s already a video game.
That goes to the weight, not the admissibility.
Testimony comes in, jury decides if it’s credible.
Going sci-fi, but I think I remember there being a thing in the altered carbon books that kind of relates to this.
In that series most people have a device implanted that can store their consciousness, it can be backed up, etc. if you die your consciousness can be uploaded to a new body, maybe a clone of your own, maybe another spare body no one was using. They get around long space flights by just sending the stored consciousness into a new body at the destination, prisoners can be uploaded to storage and their bodies used elsewhere, etc. and the only way to reliably kill someone is to destroy that device, and if they’re rich enough they may have a remote backup so even that isn’t a guarantee.
So murder victims are routinely uploaded into new bodies to testify at their own murder trials.
Catholics oppose this though, they believe that your soul is separate from your consciousness and can’t be stored in that device, backed up, etc. and so to respect their religious rights they can’t be popped into a new body to testify.
I imagine that necromancy would have the same and probably stronger opposition from a lot of religious people and we’d run into the same kind of legal issues.
I came here to mention Alerted Carbon. Glad to see someone else had the same thought!
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. I’d imagine that it would only get worse without the eyes.
More importantly the reanimated would be unquestionably under the influence of magic. Who’s to say how honest and reliable such testimony could even be.
What do you call a deer with no eyes? No eye deer. What do you call a deer with no eyes and legs? Still no eye deer.
That said, I would hope that “was it your spouse that bashed your face in with a shovel?” Might hold gravity in a witness testimony. “Yes, we were alone in the bedroom and I asked them why they had a shovel in the house, to which they responded, listen to this”. “The sound was spectacular, THONK! just as you would expect, but then I realized this is exactly how their ex was found, I’m not looking forward to spending an eternity listening to their retelling, always went on for ages”
If Necromancy became possible, Micheal Jackson would do a shot for shot remake of the thriller video, without makeup.
What recourse would there be against perjury?
Oh, there are far worse things than death.
Lol seriously, though, I’m sure we’d come up with something. Humanity is remarkably inventive when it comes to punishments. Thankfully, now, some of us are at least talking about better ways to make them fit the crime.
You will testify or you will be condemned to repeated resurrection until you rot and the last vestiges of what was your soul fade away in rotting corpse you’re bound to.
No necromancy spells require too much glitter. Think of the environmental impact.
No dude, you’re thinking of transmutation. Necromancy requires blood and that’s a renewable resource.
I think the most reasonable interpretation is that the law doesn’t currently recognize the undead as being people, let alone being the same person they were in life. It would need to be shown to be a reliable source of evidence, similar to any new technology that claims to offer insight into a case. A random judge might allow it, but it would be easy grounds for an appeal if it can’t be shown to do exactly what it claims to do.
DNA evidence was new once, but so was the polygraph. Only one of these is admissible, and for good reason.
Judging from the movie Rashomon, it wouldn’t actually resolve anything.
GURPS Technomancer is a modern setting with magic, including necromancy, ever since 1945. In some (red) States you can be sentenced to life in prison/death plus years of hard labor. Even your undead corpse is put to use clearing trash off the side of the road for 20 years.
imagine dying, and not even being able to enjoy death because you just keep being brought back to life to do stupid paperwork.
i’d stab myself and die right there, again.
It would depend on the type of necromancy, but at the end of the day, I think it would still be a conflict of interest since the person bringing them back would have great say, unless they are considered some type of expert witness necromancer.
Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination; imparting the means to foretell future events and discover hidden knowledge.
The necromancer’s capacity to create minions and command them to fight for him or her is generally enough to satisfy even the most critical of viewers. As necromancers might easily be termed one-person armies, they are usually compelling and feared. The fact that they dabble in magic and the supernatural does not help their image as upstanding citizens.
What type of necromancy is being used. If it’s from Dungeons & Dragons Fifth edition, you only get to ask them like 5 questions, and they don’t have to answer you. They can also potentially lie.
