Expert Evidence

Expert evidence has long been used by English courts. It is often needed but experts have a variety of backgrounds. They can be competent and honest. Other times it is different. The police are prone to use experts who are going to tell them what they want to hear and that means guilty. When a man gets to the top of the medical profession he can be plausible, confident and arrogant. He can also be totally wrong. Should you assume that an expert is right? Not when you are in the frame. Here are some examples to make the point. Are judges going to see through the waffle?  Yes, if you are lucky. Juries can be deceived too.
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Marietta Higgs
An arrogant, dangerous fool who wants to believe that any child is the victim of sexual abuse. She is operating in Gillingham in Kent. Beware of her.

 

Roy Meadow ex Wiki
Professor Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 1933) is a British paediatrician who rose to initial fame for his 1977 academic paper on the now controversial Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP) and his crusade against parents who willfully harm or kill their children. He was knighted for these works. He endorsed the dictum that “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise“ in his book ABC of Child Abuse and this became known as Meadow's Law and at one time was widely adopted by social workers and child protection agency in Britain. 

He appeared as an expert witness, in which his testimony played a crucial part in wrongful conviction for murder. The General Medical (GMC) struck off Meadow after he was found to have offered “erroneous” and “misleading” evidence in the Sally Clark case. Clark was a lawyer wrongly convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two baby sons, largely on the basis of Meadow's evidence; her conviction was quashed in 2003 after she had spent three years in jail. Sally Clark died in 2007 from alcohol poisoning, apparently never having recovered from her wrongful imprisonment.

I dare say that Meadow would still claim that he was right. He fouled up by his ignorance of elementary statistics and by assuming that sudden cot deaths are independent variables. The more fundamental error was his arrogance based on making it to the top of the profession.

He put Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony in prison.

 

Shaken Baby Syndrome
They make these names up as they go. Expert witnesses meddling in family life are dangerous. They are also prone to be wrong. To be fair the parents are often dead beat foreigners imported into England by a government of traitors.

For more and better details see Private Eye 1313 on page 30. It is another ugly case of institutional arrogance and abuse of state power. The Met would claim that their conduct did amount to attempted perversion of the course of justice. Others would not. It was written up in the Main Stream Media e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1300366/Teenage-parents-charged-murder-month-old-baby-son.html.

 

Tony Risdon Whines After Being Caught Out
Alleged expert moans about being distrusted.

 

Met Accused Of 'Campaign' Against Shaken Baby Witnesses
QUOTE
Three leading pathologists have accused the Metropolitan Police of attempting to discredit them as expert witnesses in so-called Shaken Baby court cases.
About 250 Non-Accidental Head Injury (NAHI) cases go to court every year, with the outcome often relying on a expert testimony from pathologists.  The Royal College of Pathologists has called for an inquiry into the claims. Responding to the allegations, the Met said the force was "completely committed to the judicial process". The scientific debate over NAHI has grown increasingly acrimonious over the past 10 years...........

Now, senior consultant pathologists have accused the Metropolitan Police and others of an orchestrated strategy to discredit them as expert witnesses for parents and carers accused of murdering their children. Dr Waney Squier, Dr. Irene Scheimberg [ a Jew - see Irene Scheimberg - Transcript Summary ],  Dr Marta Cohen say their evidence is based on a speech made by Detective Inspector Colin Welsh, a lead investigator with the Met's Child Abuse Investigation Command.

The BBC has obtained a version of the speech made at the 11th International Shaken Baby conference in Atlanta, September 2010.

In this speech, DI Welsh referred to a meeting in 2008 attended by representatives of the police, medical experts and CPS officials at which the "impact and effect of contradictory expert evidence" was discussed. The Met has confirmed the meeting took place but said it was standard procedure following an acquittal in a court case.

According to a note by a Seattle-based lawyer called Heather Kirkwood, DI Welsh talked about the failure of a number of high profile Shaken Baby prosecutions and stated the number one problem as "defence expert testimony".

He suggested as tactics to question everything about them - qualifications, employment history, testimony research papers presented by these experts, and even going to their expert bodies "to see if we turn up anything".

DI Welsh is also reported to have referred to "judicial inexperience", using the term "so deal with back door" apparently in reference to relaying concern to judges about expert witnesses.

A police spokesman confirmed that DI Welsh had given the speech but added that The Metropolitan Police Service "is completely committed to the judicial process and would never seek to improperly influence it".

Complaints        
The pathologists, however, say they were all the subject of inquiries by outside bodies initiated by the Metropolitan Police and others.

Dr Squier, who works at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, was the subject of two separate inquiries last year.

The Human Tissue Authority investigated a complaint that Dr Squier may have retained human tissue, a criminal act if true. The accusation was found to be without foundation.

The complainant was identified as an officer with the Met. DI Welsh appeared as an "interested party" in a second inquiry by the General Medical Council into Dr Squier and Dr Cohen. The GMC inquiries resulted in both doctors being brought before emergency Interim Orders Panels, but proved inconclusive.

The Human Tissue Authority also conducted an inquiry into Dr Scheimberg following a complaint from a colleague based at Great Ormond Street Hospital. She was also cleared.

Professor Tony Risdon often acts for prosecution teams and made his complaint about Dr Scheimberg based on information from a third party but which he personally could not verify. He declined to comment when approached by the BBC.

Investigation call    
Dr Squier defends the evidence she gives, saying a court "should be able to hear evidence for both prosecution and for a defence and that anybody who has a valid and sincere opinion should be given the opportunity to express that opinion in court".

"And it appears to me that there has been an attempt to remove from the courts all of those people who are willing to challenge the mainstream hypothesis, even if those opinions are sincerely held and are based on a lot of day-to-day experience and are based on a thorough grounding in the current evidence available in the scientific literature."

A spokesman said the Metropolitan Police Service had registered concerns "about certain practices of a doctor in December 2009" but declined to comment on the reasons.

"We are aware of a report registered by the National Policing Improvement Agency with the General Medical Council regarding two doctors. The MPS has co-operated with a request from the GMC in June 2010 to provide any relevant information," the spokesman added.

Professor Peter Furness, President of the Royal College of Pathologists, expressed concern about the allegations of a campaign.

"The allegations that there has been a systematic attempt to intimidate people from presenting their honestly held views to a court should be investigated," he says.

"I would normally suggest that should be investigated by the police, in this case at least some of the allegations it appears the police have been involved in it.

"There are processes for conducting investigations into police activity. It sounds to me from what I've been told that those mechanisms should probably be used.

"My concerns about this are as a private citizen not as president of the Royal College of Pathologists. I think anybody who feels the process of justice is being illegitimately subverted ought to feel concerned and ought to try to do something about it."

The BBC approached a significant number of pathologists who act for prosecution teams. They all declined a request for an interview, some saying they too had been the subject of threats and complaints.
UNQUOTE
The prosecution witnesses claim that they are the victims of threats but give no reason to believe. The defence witnesses really are being threatened by police. That is another issue apparently.

 

Vitamin Deficiency Brings Back Forgotten Diseases

 

Doubt over 'shaken baby' theory that has sent dozens of ...

 

 


Is this doctor responsible for parents being falsely branded as child abusers?  [ 29 October 2007 ]
QUOTE
Dr Southall, has been praised as a pioneer by colleagues, while vilified as arrogant and dangerous by patients [ He looks an arrogant rogue and scruffy to boot- Editor ]. He has also been in trouble over remarks he made concerning the case of Sally Clark, the mother who was given two life sentences for the murder of her two children before being released after medical evidence emerged to prove she was innocent.....

The suspicion is that justice may have been perverted by the paediatrician because vital evidence in the files — which established that the children he diagnosed as victims of parental abuse had never been harmed but were, in fact, genuinely sick — was deliberately hidden from criminal court judges [ The legal term is perverting the course of justice - Editor ].
UNQUOTE
Marietta Higgs tried it on and had 121 children stolen from their parents. See The women who went through an ordeal beyond belief.  She may well be unrepentant to this day. Other medics backed her on a basis of deep ignorance. See Stuart Bell - the relevant MP and very good. Professor Sir Roy Meadow was  very dangerous  too.

 

David Southall [ 24th May 2009 ]
QUOTE
A High Court judge is due to rule on a legal challenge by controversial paediatrician Dr David Southall against a decision to strike him off the medical register for serious professional misconduct.... The General Medical Council's (GMC) Fitness to Practise Panel decided in December 2007 that he had abused his position by accusing a mother of drugging and murdering her son...... The panel also accused him of having a "deep-seated attitudinal problem" [ Read that as gross arrogance - Editor ]....... It was the second time in three years Dr Southall, 60, had been found guilty of serious professional misconduct........... Dr Southall accused Mrs Clark's husband Steve of murdering the two boys on the basis of a television interview. At the time he was banned from child protection work for three years, a ban which expired last year.
UNQUOTE
Southall is an arrogant dangerous rogue who claims that he knows better. He has robbed parents of their children just like Marietta Higgs, caused huge distress and never admitted that he is the problem.

 

Social Services Used Alleged Expert To Steal A Mother's Child [ 7 April 2012 ]
QUOTE
'Expert' doctor took away my baby because I was trying to be a good mother
A woman has told how her baby was taken into care after controversial psychiatrist Dr George Hibbert said she was trying too hard to be ‘the perfect mother’. The leading doctor is already facing claims he deliberately misdiagnosed parents with mental disorders to have their children removed. In a damning report, he described the woman’s constant efforts to be a good mother as ‘over the top’.

Incredibly, he even claimed the healthy 24-year-old, who can be named only as Miss B, might be better off living ‘in the structured formality of institutional life’ [ That is code for a lunatic asylum - Editor ] so she could learn to be less obsessed with pleasing others. As a result of Dr Hibbert’s report, for which he was paid thousands by social services, the woman’s baby was removed from her and placed with a foster family. [ It beats doing honest work - Editor ]

The child was later returned after a string of other professionals said they had ‘no concerns’ about the woman or her parenting.
UNQUOTE
Expert Evidence can have value. It can be disastrously wrong. Marietta Higgs was one dangerous, self righteous fool who had dozens of children stolen by alleging sexual abuse. Roy Meadow, a professor if you please used his ignorance of elementary probability to put a woman in prison for murder. The reality is that when social workers take against someone they use the expert who will tell them what they want to hear. A lot of these experts make their living out the racket so they are beholden to the goose that lays the golden egg; a recipe for corruption. See Psychological Expert Opinion Is Unreliable on the point. It says:
QUOTE
It raises an automatic question as to the reliability of the judgment in 65% of cases. Actually the position is even worse as it appears that 90% of the reports are by people who make their living out of writing reports for the family courts rather than by people who practice psychology.

The inherent conflict of interest for people who need to keep getting instructions in the family court is something I have mentioned before, but is ignored by the judiciary.
UNQUOTE
There you have it from John Hemming, a good MP.

The accusation.                                                                        The perpetrator.

 

Expert Witness Not Charged With Perjury - Not Yet  [ 13 August 2018 ]   
QUOTE
A professor who has been an expert witness in hunting prosecutions and provided key evidence for the foxhunting ban has been accused of “manipulating” evidence in an academic row.  Prof Stephen Harris, a retired Bristol University academic, has been accused of “cherry-picking” studies, allowing him to “ignore or misrepresent the science that had been contrary to the activist agenda”.

The Crown Prosecution Service is now facing calls to review the suitability of Prof Harris as an expert witness.

The claims relate to a review published by Prof Harris on the welfare of circus animals. At the end of 2016, Dr Ted Friend, a recently retired professor at Texas A&M University, wrote to Bristol and the Welsh government, which commissioned the paper, raising concerns that the review was “biased” and analysed areas where he believed his evidence on animals’ behaviour in captivity had been misrepresented.

Prof Harris’s work has received hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding from animal rights groups including the League Against Cruel Sports and the RSPCA. He has denied any suggestion of bias or support of animal rights groups, insisting that his work has been held to the highest standards and his independence has been tested in court on a number of occasions, with no adverse rulings.
UNQUOTE
Harris is probably sincere in his hatred of Fox Hunting. That does not justify telling lies, perverting the truth etc. Being paid very handsomely to do it makes it worse. He might as well be working for the BBC. The Countryside Alliance puts an honest view at Bristol University denies affiliation with biased anti-hunt propaganda.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
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Updated on 12/12/2021 20:07