Expert Witnesses

In a column behind the Times paywall, football columnist Gabrielle Marcotti refers back to Zinedine Zidane's infamous head butt on Italian defender Marco Materazzi and more specifically the spurious accusations of racist abuse that were levelled against Materazzi.

Marcotti notes as an aside that the "lip reading experts" employed by the newspapers to reveal the fictitious abuse, who turned out to be either making it up or seeing what they wanted to see, are still frequently used as expert witnesses in criminal trials.

People have been convicted on the basis of the testimony given by lip reading experts.

Expert witnesses do appear to be a real problem in the criminal justice system in that they are giving evidence that non specialists, such as either the jury or the judges, are simply not competent to weigh.

The defence should cross examine the witnesses but even the greatest legal minds aren't going to be able to argue the minutiae of lipreading, paediatric medicine or gunshot particles with specialists in the field who may be wrong but at least understand the subject.

Coincidence?

The lawyer representing the thug who chucked a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank tower is Matt Foot ( son of Leninist ideologue Paul Foot). The last time I noticed his existence was when he wrote an apologia for some idiots abroad who had gone to the anti-globalisation riots in Genoa and were amazed to discover that there was violence.

Maybe he is only representing a client on the "cab rank principle" that lawyers abide by, The other possibility is that supporting left wing rioters trying to bring violence to the streets is something of a passion of his.

Policing The Police

Apparently the police are free to confiscate people's property and refuse to return even after they have been ordered to by a judge. After trying to prosecute somebody for possessing child pornography even though they knew that he was in possession of the material due to being an expert witness for the defence team of somebody who had been charged with possessing it, they then refused to return it after being ordered to by a court.

So what happened to the Chief Constable who had refused to obey the law? Nothing:

Mr Port put his 35-year career on the line by refusing to comply with a High Court order made in May to return 87 hard drives and 2,500 photographs of abuse.

However he handed over the seized items on Monday night.

Mr Bates's legal team pressed ahead with an application to have the chief constable fined or imprisoned for contempt over his delay in complying with the court order.

Lord Justice Stanley Burnton, sitting in London with Mr Justice Wilkie and Mr Justice Calvert Smith, ruled there was no contempt because the order did not specify a date by which compliance was required.

Oh I'll remember that the next time the police ask me to do something- "Yes officer I know you wanted me to pull over and I was going to do so next Friday."

Four Months!?

Why has it taken the CPS four months to decide that writing a newspaper column of which Steven Fry disapproves is not actually a crime yet? It took me 4 seconds.

Don't get me wrong I thought that the article Jan Moir wrote after the death of Stephen Gately was distasteful in its timing and illogical in its reasoning ( a gay man died, so did a previous gay man therefore being gay kills!) but the reaction was simply hysterical.

I was tempted to do a "Jan Moir vindicated" post after Alexander MacQueen's death last week, not because I believe that but the idea of attracting a Twitter hate mob is tempting.

Google: Enemy Of Libel Laws?

The top google news search suggestions, in the UK at least, when you enter "Tiger Woods" are:

1. Tiger Woods Kirsty Gallacher
2. Tiger Woods Injunction

Hmmm.

The Importance Of Punctuation.

Newspapers often use quote marks when covering criminal cases in order to not appear to be actually accusing a suspect of a crime, so much so that it must be so routine that they forget why they are using quotation marks in the first place.

I'm guessing this is why when I saw the Sun in the newsagents today it had this headline:

'Night Stalk' rapist charged

Whereas the online edition currently has this subtly different headline:

'Night Stalk rapist' charged

A small but very important difference. Being called a "Night stalker" isn't the bit that they are supposed to treat as unproven, 'Night Stalker' actually sounds kind of awesome, but the 'rapist' is thus far only an accusation.

I Ho.

Are Disney within their rights to object to "Ho White & the Seven Dwarfs"?

The article talks about potential copyright and licencing issues, but as long as the beer company isn't using aspects of the story that Disney created I don't see what they are doing wrong. Snow White was a traditional folk tale that Walt Disney took and made a feature film based on, but surely that doesn't give them the rights to all future interpretations of a story that they did not create.

Britain's Insane Libel Laws.

The gagging order issue at the behest of Carter-Ruck and their crooked* clients has rightly angered everyone. However blaming Carter-Ruck or any of the assorted gangsters, terrorists and sex offenders they represent for the situation misses the point. It is like blaming individual mosquitos for malaria whilst ignoring the swamp they breed in. In this case the swamp is the UK's grotesque libel laws that are so infamous that the US has passed a law preventing UK libel judgements being enforced over there.

Nick Cohen's article in Standpoint is probably a good place to start.

* I assume they are crooks because why else would they hire Carter-Ruck?

Baroness Scotland.

She is one of the few members of the government who is probably making a financial sacrifice to be a minister. As a qualified QC she could be raking it in.

So it is a bit surprising that she hasn't resigned already.

However if a caution or conviction for employing an illegal immigrant would lead to her disbarment then she has every incentive to cling on to office for dear life. Anyone know whether this is the case?

Putting God Before Doctors (But After Lawyers)

A US jury has found a man guilty of killing his sick 11-year-old daughter by praying for her recovery rather than seeking medical care.

......

"If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God," he said. "I am not believing what he said he would do."

So getting a doctor for his daughter would have been usurping God's role. However when it is he who is in trouble rather than his daughter his attitude to relevant expertise changes somewhat:

A lawyer representing Dale Neumann said he would appeal.

A lawyer! Why does he need a lawyer? Surely God will overturn his conviction.

That Will Teach Them To Clean Up Industrial Waste.

It's possible that I've been taken in by one side's public relations but this verdict seems to fly in the face of science:

A group of 18 young people born with deformed hands and feet after their mothers were allegedly exposed to toxic materials before their birth have won a group action lawsuit against Corby Borough Council.

According to the council various epidemiological have shown that the rate of birth deformities is not particularly high at least not to the point where it is anything other than a statistical blip.

As I say I could be mistaken about this particular verdict but the principle is clear enough. If cleaning up an industrial site leaves individuals or institutions responsible for any random clusters of illnesses that subsequently arise then fewer people are going to risk taking part in the decontamination process.

A similar process has already occurred with obstetricians and the makers of vaccines reducing the services they provide rather than become easy targets for lawyers backed up with junk science.

Courts Out For Summer.

Do Italian courts routinely break up for a summer recess? It doesn't seem the most efficient process for a notoriously slow legal system to take.

Modern Witch Hunts.

After writing about she who must not be named, I've been thinking a bit more about the whole topic of the bogus Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) scandals, concocted by an alliance of Freudian Quacks, Evangelical Christians and Radical Feminists. The obvious comparison to make is with medieval witch hunts.

Witch hunts were quite common in the middle ages but by the early modern period they were confined to just a few sects- notably the puritans. Whilst there is a puritan influence on the UK it isn't geographically concentrated enough to separate it from other cultural effects. In the United States however it is different because one part of the country, New England, was settled by puritans and their descendants spread across certain regions of the country- through New York state, the Upper Midwest, the Pacific North West and parts of coastal California. So if the SRA is a modern version of witch hunting then one would expect the cases to be concentrated in those areas. This dialect map gives some idea of what I'm talking about because language is a cultural marker:

So using lists of these cases from Imaginary Crimes, Wikipedia and any other source I came across I'd estimate the distribution of the cases to be:

New England- 4 cases
Upper Midwest- 6 cases
Pacific North West- 6 cases

New York City- 2

Midland - 3

California- 5 cases

South- 11 (3 North Carolina, 3 Texas, 4 Florida* & 1 Mississippi)

Rockies- 1

By my estimate of the 37 cases (which often involve multiple suspects) at least 16 are from areas shaped by the puritan diaspora. Puritan influence was also present in shaping the culture of California and the Rockies, so that's another 6. All of which backs my hypothesis that the ritual abuse scares are secular reinvention of witch hysteria.


* Three of the four Florida cases were from Miami, when the future US Attorney General Janet Reno was the State Attorney responsible for prosecutions.

Lawyers Ensure That Criminals/Society Get Screwed

Human rights are a good thing, there should be certain standards to which the state is compelled to meet in its treatment of people. Unfortunately there is a parasitic human rights industry which uses the language of human rights to get judges to twist the law in ever more inventive ways to undermine justice and reward lowlifes.

For instance there is a 'human right' to family life, which is a reasonable aspiration but it is rather ill defined so it can become twisted by the ECHR to mean that prisoners can have the right to start a family:

The inmates, all serving long sentences and including at least one murderer, claim they or their partners will be too old once they are released and should be allowed to donate sperm now for artificial insemination.
Six prisoners in British jails have applied to have children with their partners following a landmark European court ruling that their human rights would be breached if they are prevented from becoming fathers.

It goes without saying that no one anywhere has legislated to allow prisoners to do this, but once a legal culture is established in which judges and lawyers are free to apply interpretations of the law that bear no resemblance to what was either said or intended in the original legislation this kind of subversion of democracy is to be expected.

The case was brought by Kirk Dickson, 34, who is serving a minimum 15 years sentence for kicking a man to death, and his wife Lorraine, 48, who he met through a prison penpal scheme while she was in prison for benefits fraud.

I've got to be honest, I don't want Kirk and Lorraine to reproduce, they are unlikely to be fit parents and come to that their contribution to the gene pool is probably not desirable*. The man Kirk murdered has been removed from the gene pool so it's hard to see why his murderer should not also be removed.

The Dickson legal challenge has already cost the taxpayer more than £20,000 in legal aid.

I'm not even going to comment on the legal aid angle.

Dickson and a friend killed 41-year-old George Askins because he refused to hand over his cigarettes in Lincolnshire in 1994.

Mr Askins' family have previously bitterly attacked Dickson's attempt to have a child.

His brother Peter Askins, 53, said: "If he wanted to have a family he should have thought of that before he robbed my family of a much-loved man."

Well quite, I think their best hope now is that the courts refuse to let him reproduce on the grounds that he's a smoker.

* This may seem controversial but there is a genetic element to criminality as has been demonstrated by adoption studies. When criminals breed they are quite likely to produce future criminals.

Obama Exonerates Obama.

The scandal surrounding the sale of Obama's senate seat threatens to taint the incoming president. Not to worry though, according to the news reports:

Report clears Obama, Transition Team

So that's that dealt with. It's good to know that the President Elect is free from any hint of scandal and so is his team. So who produced this impartial report that so clearly exonerates him and his staff? Well they did:

As President-elect Obama vacationed in Hawaii, his lawyers released a report detailing contacts between the Transition Team and embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The conclusion? There was no wrong doing.

He must be breathing a sigh of relief after his own lawyers cleared him.

The Downside Of Juries: Jurors.

The big problem with trial by one's peers is that frequently those peers are gibbering imbeciles. Example one:

A rape victim has hit out at the law after the man accused of attacking her was cleared because he was sleepwalking.

Jane McKenna, 33, was asleep at home when a friend's husband, who had been a guest at a barbecue, walked into the bedroom and started having sex with her.

Jason Jeal, a 37-year-old roofer with no medical history of sleepwalking, admitted sex had taken place. But he was cleared of rape after he insisted he had been asleep and had no idea what he was doing.

Uh huh. This defence could clear anyone of anything. The only evidence that he was sleepwalking is that he claims not to remember what he was doing, this is also a symptom of being drunk.

Speaking outside his home in Portsmouth, the former member of Portchester Cricket Club said: 'I did not use sleepwalking in my defence as I did not have any doctor's evidence or anything to back that up,' he said. 'With me, sleepwalking normally comes on through drink. People have told me I've done it before.'

So he exhibits symptoms similar to being drunk after drinking and concludes he must have been sleepwalking, and a jury buys that?

{via}

Scaremongering

Is it me or is this bloke just engaged in pointless scaremongering?

The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff warning of possible higher risks from mobile phone use.

Ronald Herberman, of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said users should not wait for definitive studies on the risk and should take action now.

That's a great research institute, telling everyone not to bother with the research and just panic, perhaps we should apply that principle to the MMR vaccine next time. His memo will almost certainly provide a great service to many sleazy tort lawyers looking to extort vast sums of money from the mobile phone companies by telling credulous juries that their clients were made ill by their phones.

He lists tips including switching sides regularly while talking on mobiles.

I do that already, but the police keep pulling me over and telling me that I'm driving dangerously. I'm not a medical researcher and come to that I haven't actually had a mobile for years (people often seem amazed by that) but I seriously think that if something that widespread caused cancer then we would already know. It isn't as if the possibility hasn't been studied until now. More to the point there are few obvious mechanisms by which the radiation emitted by the phones could cause cancer.

Disagreeing With Moonbat Violates International Law.

George Moonbat claims that former American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton should be arrested for breaking international law when he visits the Hay-on-Wye book festival. About 6- comments in one of the commentators asks:

"John Bolton was not an elected politician - his most senior position was 18 months (or so) as UN ambassador. What did he do there that was illegal ?".

Good question, because even if you accept that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime perpetrated by Chimp-McHitlerburton in order to steal oil then it is still hard to see what crime John Bolton has committed, he did not plan ot execute the invasion. All the specific examples of Bolton's perfidy that Monbiot gives come down to John Bolton having different opinions to George Monbiot. For instance he cites Bolton's negotiation of the end of an arms control treaty with Russia, the treaties themselves were never signed on the basis that the could never be repealed, but in the hands of the far left this is a violation of international law.

Laws are supposed to be an agreed set of rules and principles by which people can adjust their behaviour to stay legal, in the hands of the far left 'law' is a series of elephant traps by which political opponents can be ensnared and silenced for doing things that nobody was aware was illegal. These people seriously wonder why the United States doesn't sign up to the International Criminal Court.

BREAKING NEWS!!!!

So the £10 000 000 inquest has discovered that Prince Philip didn't murder Princess Diana and that Paul Burrell is a charlatan. These are things which I was aware of before £10 million was spent.

World To End, Lawyer Objects.

The New York Times reports:

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

So not only will these scientists destroy the planet, they've also failed to produce an environmental impact study, the fiends!! Of course being the New York Times I'm surprised they haven't mentioned the impact that the end of the world would have on women and minorities.