Report and Recommendations - Scottish Government

He concluded 50 :“Although two witnesses are needed to incriminate an accused, asingle witness to each fact in a chain of circumstantial evidence can besufficient in law to warrant a conviction”.If the latter statement were the law, then it is not one grounded upon therequirement of corroboration, at least strictly.7.1.20 The contention, that having only one police officer to speak to each fact wasinsufficient, was specifically commented upon by the Lord Justice-Clerk(Thomson) as follows 51 :“If law were an exact science or even a department of logic, theremight be something to be said for this argument. By relying on thedisparate qualities of space and time the logician can prove that in arace the hare can never overtake the tortoise. But law is a practicalaffair and one has to approach its problems in a mundane commonsense way. We cannot expect always to have a tidy and interrelatedpicture, in real life a surrealistic element is apt to creep in, and thepicture, although untidy and unharmonious, may be a picture all thesame… The analytical approach to the problem is over subtle andover-simplifies the problem. When one views that problem as apractical issue, the only risk is that the knob was not pressed at theprecise moment; in other words that the presser was unreliable forsome reason or another. The safeguard against this risk is whether thetribunal believes the witness, and that is the safeguard which mayoperate whenever a link in the chain or a tile in the mosaic or a piecein the jigsaw is spoken to by one witness only”.50 at 3851 at p 40252