I have appeared as an expert witness quite a few times in a past life, albeit always at magistrate / sheriff court level and in connection with food quality / contamination issues. My view is that flipping a coin would probably give a more accurate judgement. I was normally asked to appear by a food company although at times I did warn them that sometimes my evidence might not be to their advantage but I would have to give it as I saw it.
Anyhow let me give you an example of a case where I thought that there was a cut and dried ‘not guilty’ verdict coming.
The case involve a metal bolt in a sausage. By the time I got the evidence it had been mauled by a public analyst. However it was clear that the sausage had been cut along its length and the bold was more or less central and the head had been approximately flush with the plane of the cut with the shaft of the bolt at right angles to the length of the sausage. That in itself is unlikely. We put some bolts of the same size and shape through the sausage filler at the Research Association where I worked, and admittedly with a small sample size, they tended to go through into the sausage with the head leading the way and with the shaft following at an angle of about 30 degrees. The head normally went towards the outside of the sausage. This would be expected as the sausage meat would tend to push the head forward with the shaft following. I analysed the metal that the bolt was made of and found it to be cadmium plated, such bolts would not be allowed in food machinery. The bolt was a good match for bolts used in telephone exchanges at the time.
The public analyst had reported that as he pulled the bolt out of the sausage with tweezers the force require was such that it indicated that the bolt had been cooked inside the sausage rather than being pushed in afterwards. We cooked bolts in sausages, pushed bolts into sausages and screwed bolts into sausages and measures the force required to pull them out with an Instron and found no difference between the force required pull out the bolt between that which had been cooked in the sausage and that which had been pushed in and a very small,increase in the force required to remove the bolt that had been screwed into the cooked sausage.
My colleague, a meat technologist, carried out a factory inspection and found no bolts resembling those found in the sausage (though he didn’t go 30’ up to the roof to inspect the sheilded fluorescent light fitting). The metal detector consistently rejected a pack of sausages with the bolt inside one of the sausages and the factory records showed that the metal detector was functioning correctly and had been checked as required on the day the sausage had been manufactured.
In my view we had assembled irrefutable evidence that the bolt had not got into the sausage in the factory. Certainly enough to to raise reasonable doubt that it had been the result of a factory incident.
At the court case the complainant who was a telecom engineer working in an exchange gave evidence. He was a middle aged slightly below average height and slightly above average weight for his height, bespectacled and balding. Asked for his account of how the bolt had been discovered he responded “I was making supper for my disabled wife……..”. At this point I thought that simply because the alternative to it being a factory incident was, effectively, to accuse him of deliberately putting the bolt into the sausage that the magistrate would find it easier to find the company guilty, which he did. Perhaps the under threat Scottish “not proven” verdict (which was in my view the most appropriate verdict in many of the cases I was involved in) would have provided an escape route for the magistrate.
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