Report and Recommendations - Scottish Government

Practical Considerations7.2.15 How does the requirement work in practice? How do these rules within rulesactually operate in the courts? The best clue to understanding howcorroboration works is to grasp that, however the requirement is phrased intheory, it is about the number of witnesses speaking to a fact or facts and notabout the number of different, or separate, facts necessary to prove a case.When reference is made, in the context of the requirement, to a “source ofevidence”, it is to the testimony of a single witness and not to a particular fact.Thus, as an easy example, two closely related witnesses standing at a streetcorner may each identify a particular individual as someone who assaulted avictim. They will each corroborate the other, even if they are brother andsister, husband and wife or members of the same gang. Another example iswhere there is CCTV involved. Provided that the recovered recording isproved by two witnesses to show the scene of a crime, two witnesses eachidentifying a person from the recording as the assailant will suffice, even ifthey are both police officers viewing the recording later. The CCTV recordingis not the “source of evidence”. The corroborating sources are the twowitnesses speaking to the recording and the two (possibly the same) witnessesidentifying the person shown.7.2.16 Similar considerations apply to forensic evidence, such as a fingerprintrecovered or found at the scene or the discovery of a person’s DNA on anobject at the locus. The finding of a fingerprint or DNA at the scene of acrime does not constitute a single source of evidence which requires to becorroborated for guilt to be established. It is a solitary fact, but one which, if262