The Jama Legal Narrative . Part I : The

Geiger and Stollman graduated in 1994 at Bar-Ilan University; under Nissan's supervision, they had implemented a prototype in the early phase of the JAMA project. Occasional references in the rst person are to Nissan, who wrote the paper. Abstract For the purposes of starting to tackle, within AI, the narrative aspects of legal narratives in a criminal evidence perspective, traditional AI models of narrative understanding can arguably supplement extant models of legal narratives from from the scholarly literature of law, jury studies, or the semiotics of law. Not only: the literary (or cinematic) models prominent in a given culture impinge, with their poetic conventions, on the way members of the culture make sense of the world. This shows glaringly in the sample narrative from the Continent|the Jama murder, the inquiry, and the public outcry|we analyse in this paper. Apparently in the same racist crime category as the case of Stephen Lawrence's murder (in Greenwich on April 22, 1993), with the ensuing still current controversy in the U.K., the Jama case (some twenty years ago) stood apart because of a very unusual element: the eyewitnesses identifying the suspects were a group of football referees and linesmen eating together at a restaurant, and seeing the sleeping man as he was set ablaze in a public park nearby. Professional background as witnesses-cum-facttnders in a mass sport, and public perceptions of their required characteristics, couldn't but feature prominently in the public perception of the case, even more so as the suspects were released by the magistrate conducting the inquiry. There are sides to this case that involve diierent expected eeects in an inquisitorial criminal procedure system from the Continent, where an investigating magistrate leads the inquiry and prepares the prosecution case, as opposed to trial by jury under the Anglo-American adversarial system. In the JAMA prototype, we made an attempt to approach the given case from the coign of vantage of narrative models from AI. 1 Knowing for Sure \Like malaria and tubercolosis, bad witness, too, reaps its victims by the thousands" (Carnelutti 1931). The truthfulness, accuracy, and credibility of suspect, victim and witness depositions are debated in forensic psychology (Memon et al. 1998). A deposition may be deceitful (Vrij 2000). Bad witness may depend on deliberate lying under oath (see, e.g., Underwood 1993). Or, then, it may depend on inaccurate identiication. The research literature on eyewitness identiication is large (e.g., Cliiord and Bull …