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I consider myself a generalist. More specifically, I try to find patterns in one part of reality which are replicated elsewhere, in order to understand reality better. I filed “criminal law” under “science” in my mind when I recognized the epistemological similarities between falsification in science and “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal laws.
My belief in “beyond a reasonable doubt” was somewhat shaken by having watched the TV series “Bull”. However, I was fairly confident that American law, by and large, gets it right. Until today, when I ran across this article on LessWrong. Basically, there are so many confounders in most experiments that actually learning something new is unlikely if the experiment is made to test one variable.
If criminal law and science are twin methods of knowing, both based on eliminating all reasonable doubt, I no longer have faith in the death penalty except in the most absolutely obvious and clear-cut of non-cherrypicked cases.
Criminal law is absolutely not a "method of knowing." It is a method for sorting through socially-disapproved conduct. The jury is not engaged in an epistemological analysis; they're exercising raw judgment. "Do we want to put up with this?" "Is that excusable?" "Does he seem like a person who should be expelled from civilization?"
All of the dialogue-style examples you gave seem to be the jury assuming the prosecutor is telling the truth about the events in question. Yet every political side can point to one of their own being wrongfully prosecuted. So clearly, the primary duty of the court is to determine whether something happened a certain way or another, with level of criminality to be adjudged after existence of criminality.
It is the court’s use of falsifiability in determination of existence of criminality in a given case which shares epistemological roots with the scientific process.
The law of evidence is a masterpiece of applied philosophy, where the central question is "how can we be confident (for any value of confident) that we know something is true?" The intricacies of hearsay and the balancing of admissibility (probative value vs. prejudicial effect) come from hard-won knowledge about measuring claims to truth in an imperfect world where people lie, or are mistaken, or were not present to observe the thing you really want to know about. It is top to bottom messy compromises and carefully honed best guesses presented to a random sample of average folk who are supposed to use common sense to sort truth from fiction.
The reason a lot of it is so complex is simple--the problem is really really hard, and we need a workable approach now. So we have a system, the result of centuries of work across millions upon millions of cases, trying to provide a delicate compromise between accuracy, fairness, efficiency, and a host of other values.
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