The Case for Defense — Grahame Greene

A courtroom is about to convict a man for murder on the strength of confident eyewitnesses — until the defence produces something the identification never accounted for: an identical twin. Graham Greene's “The Case for the Defence” is built around a single legal weakness you will meet again in every criminal-law paper after this one: how much can eyewitness identification actually prove?

In two minutes

The story's entire drama is one identification collapsing under a doubt nobody had planned for — the defendant's own identical twin — and it uses that collapse to ask what 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' really requires once an eyewitness turns out to be wrong about the one thing she was sure of.

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