By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (May 27th 2011)
Prevention
It’s been over 20 years since Lynette White was brutally murdered in the Butetown district of Cardiff. A lot has changed, including the use of forensic sciences and how advances in these disciplines are utilised. It’s unlikely that the errors that plagued the Lynette White Inquiry could occur again, but that doesn’t excuse them completely. DNA testing systems were not sufficiently developed to make the telling contribution that it did to this case in the late 1980s. That was nobody’s fault.
However, various crime-scene, forensic sciences and investigative techniques could have prevented the inquiry from going awry if only they had been applied as they should have been. This was an entirely preventable miscarriage of justice, and sadly, it is far from unique in that respect.
Standards
“We’re in a very different world now and, since 1995, so post-dating this investigation, the forensic science laboratories in the UK have all adopted an international standard for testing calibration laboratories”, said the Forensic Science Regulator, Andrew Rennison. “This standard was first introduced in 1995. The Forensic Science Service, which was then the leading laboratory in the UK, led the way towards the adoption of this standard, ISO [International Standards Organisation] 17025”.
Among the standards that it assured are: “an independent assessment of the robustness of the management systems of the laboratory, including the core management systems [and] it assesses the competence of the scientists and equally importantly – in fact probably most importantly – it demands clear evidence of the validation of the methods employed, so if you are a DNA laboratory, you will apply for accreditation against ISO 17025 for the DNA methods you are employing”, Rennison said.
Cold Comfort
He believes that the procedures that have been introduced now would prevent repetition of the case of the Cardiff Five, but that is cold comfort to the many victims of that particularly vexed inquiry. It is a case that should never have been allowed to drift so badly off the rails. There’s no doubt that ISO 17025 is a very significant step in the right direction for all sides. It provides the standards that must be met, by which forensic scientists will be judged. It will therefore protect those who meet the standard and expose those who do not. This alone will make repetition of the forensic science failings that helped to secure this and other notorious miscarriages of justice.
However, these new procedures do not deal with what happened in this case and without thorough investigation of it to establish exactly how the forensic science was manipulated, or went awry, it is impossible to establish if there is a generic problem or not. Although the methods used may vary from inquiry to inquiry, there are sad examples of forensic science being manipulated into saying the opposite of what the science actually suggests.
That happened in the Lynette White Inquiry. Sadly, it is not an isolated example and there are still glaring flaws in the procedures.
“It will never deal with a difference of opinion”, Rennison says. “You’re always going to have to trust the judgement of the experts in the day, but what you have behind that now are far more robust validation processes and standards they have to work to, so they’re far more accountable now than they ever were”.
Insufficient
But one of the crucial problems in this whole process was the role of expert witnesses. Dr John Whiteside was the expert relied on by the Crown at the original trials of the Cardiff Five in 1989 and 1990 (John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted after the second trial and the Cardiff Three – Yusef Abdullahi, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris – were wrongfully convicted. Abdullahi’s defence instructed an expert to challenge the cocktail hypothesis, but their expert, Dr Patrick Lincoln, could not rule out the possibility that it had happened, although he thought that it was improbable.
For reasons to be detailed in my forthcoming book The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt, that opinion was far too conservative. That expert was a blood expert, but the expertise required to debunk Whiteside’s opinion was scene of crime and blood distribution pattern rather than the likelihood of blood mixing. The wrong expert opinion or wrong choice of expert could, and in this case, did, have dire consequences, and, in fact contributed to a major miscarriage of justice.
Reconciliation
“It’s taken a number of years for the standards to creep through the laboratories”, Rennison says. “Since ’95 a whole new quality standards framework is in place, though I have to say you still have to rely on the judgement of experts and there’s always going to be arguments around that even nowadays. That’s what court trials are for. Court trials are invariably resolving the differences between experts in evidence and there’s no standard you can ever create that will carve its way through that. What you do demand is that when experts give evidence that they are using evidence that is robust; it’s tested; it’s valid, peer-reviewed and they’ve got to be prepared, more so than they were in 1995”.
But that simply didn’t apply in the Lynette White Inquiry and it still doesn’t. Trial is far, far too late in the process to reconcile differences of opinion on the science. That should have been done long before cases come to trial.
The quest for justice