Conviction by Contradiction: Difference between revisions

** You can also bypass the whole "logic" aspect and say that you know who did it and that your reasoning is that "[[Crowning Moment of Funny|fat people always lie.]]"

* ''[[Mass Effect]] 2'' has a sidequest where Shepard must use various fragments of messages to identify which of five possibilities is the [[Knowledge Broker|Shadow Broker's]] chief agent on Ilium. The solution comes down to the use of a single contradictory pronoun to give the answer {{spoiler|-'none of the above'}}. Of course you are working for Liara, not the courts, and she's no longer too hung up on the whole 'reasonable doubt' thing.

*** Although, leaving that uncertainty in tact and making Liara overreact like that is almost certainly intentional, seeing as how it drives home that Liara is acting a few krogan testicles short of a quad nowadays.

**** To be fair Liara's reaction to this information was to go and confront Nyxeris about it, not to snipe her from ambush. When Nyxeris reacted to being questioned on this by trying to pull a gun, at that point her guilt stopped being in much doubt.

* The DOS edutainment game, ''[[Eagle Eye Mysteries]]'' falls victim to this at least once. Although the guilty party usually tells a very blatant lie that makes ''everything'' they say untrustworthy, you usually find other physical evidence too. Not so in one case, where a suspected Moon rock theft hinges almost entirely on the thief calling said object a sedimentary rock, despite the player researching in-game that it is physically impossible for a Moon rock to be sedimentary. No other evidence is found to implicate the suspect. (Because if you don't know your basic geology terms, you are clearly a thief.)

* Played with in the ''[[Ace Attorney]]'' series. This trope is literally the core mechanic of the games; your entire job is to find contradictions in witness testimony, either by presenting contradictory evidence or showing that the scene was arranged in such a way as to make their actions impossible. Generally inverted by Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice (proving a defendant innocent by poking holes in the evidence against them), but played straight by Miles Edgeworth. Naturally, though, the games would be boring if there were no twists; therefore, the trope is averted, subverted, doubly subverted, zig-zagged, and generally tied in knots by pratically every case.

*** The above example isn't strictly ''conviction'' based solely on the contradiction; the contradiction is alleged to be proof that the witness was lying about having been a passenger, which is then used to bring out the ''real'' secret that the witness was trying to hide with that lie.

** That said, it's often subverted. Just because there's a contradiction in a witness's testimony doesn't necessarily mean the witness is lying, or even mistaken. In fact, it's even ''inverted'' a few times; a seeming contradiction in the testimony sometimes results in a reevaluation of the evidence, changing the tone of the case entirely.

* Parodied in ''[[Moral Orel]]'', in which Orel starts a detective agency. There are two suspects when the contents of Reverend Putty's collection basket is stolen: Joe the [[Devil in Plain Sight]], and a clearly-innocent Susie. Orel ignores the expensive ice cream Joe has bought, and the fact Susie wasn't even in church at the time, and bases his conclusions on which Commandments they broke (or didn't break): Joe honored the Commandment about keeping the Sabbath Holy by refusing to cut his grandfather's lawn, while Susie broke the Commandment of honoring her parents by volunteering at a retirement center instead of going to church like she was told. If she broke one Commandment, then [[Jump Off the Slippery Slope|surely she would be the sort of person to break "Thou shalt not steal".]]

* [[Double Subverted]] by ''[[Beavis and Butthead]]'', of all people. When our heroes are accused of egging Tom Anderson's house, Butt-Head is inspired by a court reporter he saw on TV to try and discredit Anderson's testimony by pointing out that Anderson couldn't clearly identify who threw the rotten eggs at his house. The judge is about to dismiss the case when the prosecutor objects, stating that neither Anderson nor any of the police reports or court documents had ever said the eggs were rotten. He then asks how Butt-Head could have known the eggs were rotten unless he and Beavis were the ones that threw them. Butt-Head has no response, and he and Beavis are sentenced to 500 hours community service.

* In the first Sideshow Bob episode of ''[[The Simpsons]]'', Bart and Lisa's investigation basically comes down to this. First Lisa realises that Krusty wouldn't have used the Kwik-E-Mart microwave because he has a pacemaker, then that he couldn't have been reading the Springfield Review of Books at the magazine rack because he can't read. Sideshow Bob argued Krusty wasn't one to follow medical warnings and didn't need to be able to read to enjoy the Springfield Review of Books. Finally, in a [[Eureka Moment]], Bart remembers that Homer stepped on the ends of fake Krusty's long shoes, which his feet would not have been long enough to fit, but Sideshow Bob's are.

 

* This is one of the reasons you're never supposed to talk to police officers unless there's a lawyer present. It's quite easy to say something that could be misconstrued as suspicious or incriminating, and police in [[Real Life]] are more diligent than in fiction about using holes in a person's statement as a starting point to single out the suspect(s) who will be investigated more thoroughly via obtaining warrants and gather the real evidence that's used in a conviction. When the police tell you [[Miranda Rights|anything you say "can and will" be used against you]] they aren't kidding. Conventional legal wisdom is to invoke your right to an attorney and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik never speak] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE to police officers] if you think the police suspect you of a crime. The lawyer is there as a witness.

* Police are also more experienced and versed at some of the less well-known cues for discerning between how an innocent person vs. a guilty one will react to being accused of a misdeed and what would constitute suspicious behavior/language:

** Another thing is that if someone is telling the truth they will defend it constantly and they will sound shocked and confused, but if they are lying they will sound angry or embarrassed (i.e. defensive) because they've been found out. A guilty person will make up stories as to what they were doing at the time of the incident, often contradicting themselves. They will usually end up confessing due to their feelings of guilt.

* Also, the "found out as a foreign spy because--" examples are very much [[Truth in Television]] if for no other reason than if you're found out as a spy, you're less likely to end up in front of a jury in a public court with all those pesky "standards of proof" and more likely to end up in a dark hole in a location known to no one with the government of the host country giving you some [[Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique|harsh interrogation]], and pointing out the holes in their evidence is most certainly going to fall on deaf ears.