![]() ![]() Next came the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, when angry American colonists dumped 342 chests of tea imported by the British East India Company into the Boston Harbor. (The defense would cost Adams many of his clients, but would elevate his public profile.) A Boston lawyer named John Adams agreed to defend the soldiers. In 1770, British troops in Boston opened fire on a crowd that had pelted them with snowballs, rocks, and shelled oysters, killing five. Library of Congress Paul Revere drew this picture of the Boston Massacre in 1770.įrom there, relations continued to sour. Why Was The Declaration Of Independence Written? But Jefferson’s original draft would go on to have many edits before emerging as the historical catalyst known as the Declaration of Independence. The committee assigned the first draft to Jefferson. Relations with the British government had steadily deteriorated since the widely despised Stamp Act of 1765 that imposed a direct tax on the colonists.Ĭongress had tasked Jefferson and four other delegates - John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, the so-called “Committee of Five” - to create a declaration of independence from Great Britain. Jefferson, like all colonists, had lived through a turbulent decade. As Jefferson wrote, his 14-year-old valet, a slave named Robert Hemings, stood nearby.įor more than a month, Jefferson had witnessed debates among the Second Continental Congress in the stuffy Pennsylvania State House. Jefferson’s writing was influenced by the debates of weeks past, and by his reading of philosophers like Thomas Paine and John Locke. In the interim, though, we should abandon status as a proxy for credibility.Library of Congress Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson review the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. It may be that soon we will have some scientific way to identify liars. The side-effect is that it perpetuates systemic biases in the justice system. The effect of this categorical error (confusing status with veracity) is to abandon the avowed purpose of evidence law – truth seeking – in favor of the very different, and potentially contrary goal of norm enforcement. I show this using both historical and modern examples. In other words, impeachment rules enforce not a scientific but a status-based view of truth in which status markers, such as reputation and prior crimes, determine who will be deemed a probable liar. ![]() The purpose of these rules is to identify which persons have the culturally recognized moral integrity or honor to be worthy of belief in court. This Article identifies the reason for their endurance in the face of overwhelming evidence: impeachment rules are not and never have been about identifying false statements in order to get to the truth. Scholars, judges and rulemakers have criticized this system of impeachment, demonstrating again and again that the rules are ineffective at identifying liars and lack any social science basis. For example, a witness’s credibility can be impeached with evidence that she has a fraud conviction because in theory that conviction suggests she is deceitful and is therefore likely to lie under oath. Evidence jurisprudence assumes that impeachment rules are intended to help determine the truth of the matter by identifying liars.
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