Has anyone taken the trouble to read her book "Expert Witness" ?I saw it in Dymock's today and flicked through it.There is it seem very little on the Bain retrial and appears to be more a descriptive account of the footprint experiment conducted with DB .Nothing about the conflicting evidence and Mr Justice Prankhurst's critcisms.
Her book on the whole might show us whether in fact Forensics can be regarded as a true science re the debate on JFRB recently?
Expert Witnesses are a source of a lot of legal and scientific debate as new methods arise that throw doubt on past "accepted science" comes unstuck in tests. Expert Witnesses get a pretty easy run here with much of their utterances being treated as though they are from god. So much past science has been turned on its ear. Finger prints have come in for scientific scrutiny after some cases where Experts have taken as not completely unigue now after experts were in Blind tests finding the same prints as different and different as the same but Computer recognition has put paid to that to a certain point as the microchip can mearuse many more points than visual comparison. Hair comparison was was accepted science, not any longer after blind tests revealed two adjacent hairs from the same head can be different. all that can be said now is the race and part of body a hair comes from can be said with certainty. Witnesses vary in what they see and can be manipulated easily. Forensic Science
is in deep trouble in some fields as new methods and electronics cast doubt on once accepted work.
But the real world isstill far from as clear cut as CSI
http://www.theforensicgroup.co.nz/death-destruction-science-its-a-winner/
All you need to read about the Bain case in her book is here.
If that is an example of her work and how she goes about things then lord help New Zealand forensics She gave shoddy evidence in R v Watson as well on some of the blood work and lacked the knowlwedge the paint is absorbant and wipeing a wall would not remove blood completely.
I am a blood donor, and was told that donated blood has to have a chemical added immediately after collection. The reason for this is that when blood is withdrawn or spilt from the body, it will separate within minutes into dark red clot and straw-coloured serum. This is Mother Nature’s clever way of stopping us from bleeding out after an injury.
Did the forensic scientist treat the cow blood at the abattoir? If it was untreated and not used for several hours after the death of the cow, then the amount of separation in the cow blood would be significantly different to that in the fresh human blood that was stepped in by the killer in Stephen’s bedroom. Could the cow blood have been more viscous or sticky?
I am not a scientist or a detective, but I have studied research methods at University, and there are many variables in an experiment that can confound the results.
I wondered if the climate would make a difference to the size of the prints produced. She should get together with Karam and write novels.
