Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Only by gov’t-licensed necromancers, otherwise there’s a risk of witness tampering.
Somewhere in Tokyo there’s a manga author furiously taking notes on this as the plot line. Three months from now a new manga will hit store shelves:
“I got killed and now I’m the key witness at my own murder trial”
I think that’s already a video game.
Which game? It doesn’t ring a bell for me
Might be ace attorney, mediums channel spirits of the deceased and I think in one of the later games those spirits are also called as witnesses for their murder.
It depends on the necromancy.
Most forms of necromancy create a being under the control of their necromancer. In that case, the dead’s testimony would be worthless as the dead would be under the complete control of another.
If Necromancy became possible, Micheal Jackson would do a shot for shot remake of the thriller video, without makeup.
Going sci-fi, but I think I remember there being a thing in the altered carbon books that kind of relates to this.
In that series most people have a device implanted that can store their consciousness, it can be backed up, etc. if you die your consciousness can be uploaded to a new body, maybe a clone of your own, maybe another spare body no one was using. They get around long space flights by just sending the stored consciousness into a new body at the destination, prisoners can be uploaded to storage and their bodies used elsewhere, etc. and the only way to reliably kill someone is to destroy that device, and if they’re rich enough they may have a remote backup so even that isn’t a guarantee.
So murder victims are routinely uploaded into new bodies to testify at their own murder trials.
Catholics oppose this though, they believe that your soul is separate from your consciousness and can’t be stored in that device, backed up, etc. and so to respect their religious rights they can’t be popped into a new body to testify.
I imagine that necromancy would have the same and probably stronger opposition from a lot of religious people and we’d run into the same kind of legal issues.
I call the corpse of John Smith to the stand.
Mr Smith, where were you on the night of October the fourth?
……ungh……hiss…… BRAINS….
Nobody knows more about dying than dead people
What type of necromancy is being used. If it’s from Dungeons & Dragons Fifth edition, you only get to ask them like 5 questions, and they don’t have to answer you. They can also potentially lie.
GURPS Technomancer is a modern setting with magic, including necromancy, ever since 1945. In some (red) States you can be sentenced to life in prison/death plus years of hard labor. Even your undead corpse is put to use clearing trash off the side of the road for 20 years.
What do you mean by “possible”? Most jurisdictions have a law against interfering with the dead / a corpse, and necromancy, while suddenly possible would therefore remain highly illegal.
Even if legalised, consider how often difficult decisions have to be made about whether to exhume a corpse to seek evidence of some sort. I can’t imagine it would be any easier to decide to have a corpse resurrected.
Habeas corpus takes on an entirely different bent, for sure.
There’s also the state of mind of someone who has been resurrected to take into account as well. There they were in oblivion or eternal rest or whatever it is that the dead experience and suddenly they’re dragged back to this mortal coil with thoughts, feelings and the knowledge they’ve been dead for a long time, and there’s living people who haven’t been through any of that throwing questions at them left, right and centre.
If it happened often enough, advocacy groups for the unwillingly resurrected would be set up. And more people would opt for cremation.
Going with D&D’s version of necromancy… probably not. Undead have a strong and innate anti-life bias. Some intelligent undead are likely to be able to mask it, but without exceptionally strong wills will likely still act in a way that will cause the most death.
Non-undead ressurected individuals would likely be able to testify, however.
So you’re saying we should use the undead to replace the police? I mean sure they might more people, but at least they won’t be discriminatory about it.
Hey, so long as someone with more ethics than the average patrol officer is in charge of the Command Undead spell, skeleton cops might even be safer and more humane for everyone…
It would depend on the type of necromancy, but at the end of the day, I think it would still be a conflict of interest since the person bringing them back would have great say, unless they are considered some type of expert witness necromancer.
Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination; imparting the means to foretell future events and discover hidden knowledge.
The necromancer’s capacity to create minions and command them to fight for him or her is generally enough to satisfy even the most critical of viewers. As necromancers might easily be termed one-person armies, they are usually compelling and feared. The fact that they dabble in magic and the supernatural does not help their image as upstanding citizens.
