274

Murder conviction of Chicago man who spent 12 years behind bars overturned because key eyewitness was legally blind (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] [email protected] 40 points 2 years ago

Legally blind is not the same thing as being totally blind. My brother is "legally blind" but he can see well enough to read and drive a car. Still you have to wonder why the court didn't take this into consideration at the time - what was motivating the judge to overlook this fact and allow this man to be incarcerated on the basis of flawed eyewitness testimony? Someone had this court's short hairs in their grips.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

So what does it means "Legally blind" if he can drive and read? What's the threshold to be considered legally blind?

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Found this definition;

In the United States, legal blindness means your central visual acuity—the part of your vision that allows you to see straight ahead—is 20/200 or less in your better eye when wearing corrective lenses. With 20/200 vision, you can see at 20 feet what a person with 20/20 vision sees at 200 feet. Or, your 20-degree field allows for seeing only right in front of you.

You can be legally blind with tunnel vision, i.e. you can see directly ahead, but nothing out of the corner of your eye.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

That sound dangerous when doing something other than reading. Even walking could be a problem without having peripheral view.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

He has lost most of his eyesight in one eye due to a childhood illness. He does have a driver's license, but it says "legally blind" on it. Legally blind just means you can still see, just not that clearly. It can include all kinds of other eye conditions that don't make you actually blind.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Ok, I understand. Thank you for your explanation. I live in Europe and I'm not sure we have something like that here. I think that if you can't see very well you can either drive with glasses or be denied to drive.

load more comments (6 replies)

this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023

274 points (99.6% liked)

Not The Onion

16846 readers

1614 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]