Archive for expert witness
Yes, I got it wrong – and then an innocent’ man was jailed for life.
Fourteen years ago David Canter helped to convict a man of murdering his pregnant wife. The psychologist explains why he now rejects crucial evidence of a fake suicide note.
In 1992 I was asked to assist a murder inquiry by commenting on the authorship of a suicide note in the handwriting of Paula Gilfoyle. I had provided guidance to a number of other big investigations.
The police officer leading the inquiry presented the suicide note to me with the fascinating thesis that it had been dictated to Paula ...
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A decision in the Court of Appeal last week drew a firm line between expert witness medical evidence and forensic decisions.In Re M (A Child) the child had suffered a rare ulna fracture and a tibia fracture which the parents could not explain. At the fact finding hearing the mother raised the possibility that the child might suffer from osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that means bones break with abnormal ease. An expert called in by the mother could not find any signs of the disease but suggested further testing to rule out that possibility. The judge held that the expert witness ...
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The home secretary, David Blunkett, has agreed to pay compensation to Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, the former nursery nurses who won a libel case after being falsely accused of child abuse. Mr Blunkett has exonerated the pair of criminal charges based on facts arising from a case in the civil courts. Lawyers have also pointed out that the decision to accept the pair’s claim has been reached, for the Home Office, with exceptional speed. Ms Reed, 31, and Mr Lillie, 38, were originally charged with child abuse at Shieldfield nursery in central Newcastle in 1993, but were acquitted the ...
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Bob Woffinden ask Professor Gisli Gudjonsson, why do people admit to crimes they have never committed.
Guardian
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Council leader Tony Flynn has refused to quit over Newcastle’s handling of the Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie nursery abuse allegations.The council faces a £5 million legal bill after the former nursery workers won a libel action over the false accusations earlier this year.Last night, at a heated meeting at Newcastle Civic Centre, councillors were presented with a report into the catalogue of mistakes made by the council in handling the alleged abuse claims.
IC Newcastle
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A North-East council has admitted to a catalogue of mistakes over the way a review team was set up to investigate allegations of abuse at a nursery. Former nursery workers Dawn Reed, 31, and Christopher Lillie, 37, won their libel battle in July against false accusations that they had abused children in their care. Newcastle City Council is now facing a £5 million bill after they commissioned a report which made the unfounded allegations. Summing up after the five-month High Court trial which ended in July, Mr Justice Eady said the workers “merited an award at the highest permitted level” ...
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Newcastle City Council will have to pay £25,000 in legal costs for the assessment of whether to appeal against the decision in a libel action.The sum was revealed in answer to a written question at a public meeting of the council last night.
IC Newcastle
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Former nursery boss Joyce Eyeington today broke nearly a decade of silence over the Tyneside child abuse scandal and told how it wrecked her life. Read this disturbing account in which Ms Etherington says “… as soon as the inquiry escalated and the police were involved it became very difficult to express disbelief. It was not a popular stance.”
IC Newcastle
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“This case isnt about me, it is about all the trauma that so many families have been through over so many years,” says Richard Barker. His story begins about ten years ago when Newcastle city council dismissed nursery nurses Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie after allegations of child abuse at their nursery in Shieldfield. The pair were subsequently acquitted at a criminal trial. But after more complaints, Barker, who was running a child-protection course at Northumbria University at the time, was invited to lead a review team to look into child safety in the region and to investigate the general ...
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The extent to which outside agencies became involved in Shieldfield was highlighted by the consultant paediatrician much criticised during the libel trial, Dr Camille San Lazaro, who in her letter to the editor of the journal, Child Abuse Review, Vol 3, 1994, expounded the need for a specialised approach to day care multiple abuse incidents. She described the parents’ immediate demand for services from up to 30 organisations in the Newcastle area, including general practitioners, casualty departments, school doctors, health visitors, Childline, Incest Line, Rape Crisis, the NSPCC, Barnardos, community psychiatric nurses and the clergy. Were all these people and ...
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Campaigners are calling on the doctor at the centre of a child abuse controversy to hand back her OBE. Action Against False Allegations of Abuse is demanding that Camille San Lazaro return the gong she was given in 1999 for “services in the care of sexually abused children”.
IC Newcastle
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It would be reassuring to dismiss Shieldfield as a terrible aberration. The story of what happened to Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie is so bizarre that it might seem to be without parallel. But that would be to replace one delusion by another. On the day after the libel judgment, the Guardian newsdesk was contacted by a reader who told them of a similar case. And the next day, 1 August, Canadian journalist Margaret Wente published a story which has close parallels with Shieldfield. This concerned a police officer who had lived for 10 years under the shadow of horrific ...
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New guidance on the conduct of local authority inquiries will aim to prevent a repeat of the libel action brought by two nursery nurses falsely accused of sexually abusing children in a Newcastle city council report. A consultation paper drawn up by the Law Commission recommends extending statutory qualified privilege, which protects reports discussed in public council meetings from libel claims, to any local authority inquiry report as long as the proceedings and the publication are both fair.
Note: FACT North Wales submitted a paper to the Law Commission as part of the consultation excercise.
Guardian
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Key figures in the 1998 Newcastle city council inquiry team investigating the Shieldfield Nursery child abuse allegations SocietyGuardian.co.uk staffWednesday July 31, 2002 Jacqui Saradjian is a consultant clinical psychologist, and head of the city-wide forensic service for Leeds community and mental health teaching trust, where she works with people who are considered to be mentally disordered offenders. She has a first class psychology degree a masters in clinical psychology. Ms Saradjian’s specialist area of research involves women who sexually abuse children and the effects of that abuse on their child victims. She teaches regularly on the postgraduate doctorate training course ...
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Sir Roy Meadow, one of the country’s leading experts on child abuse, gave erroneous and misleading evidence in the trial of Sally Clark which helped to convict her of murdering her two sons, the General Medical Council ruled yesterday. A disciplinary panel found that Professor Meadow, 72, failed in his duty as an expert witness to explain the limited relevance of his findings when giving evidence in Mrs Clark’s prosecution in 1999. The paediatrician told the solicitor’s murder trial that the chances of two babies suffering cot death within an affluent family was 1 in 73 million. In his testimony ...
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The problems of presenting statistical evidence in context of Sally Clarks conviction at Chester Crown Court by 10-2 majority, of smothering her two infant children. [This article was published in January 2000 yet it took over three years to overturn Sally's conviction]
British Medical Journal
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