GIST:  "We now know that the warnings, which were effectively ignored, were justified. If the witness did the tests he claimed, he failed to properly document or record them, and, in some cases, it appears impossible that he could have found what he says he did. In any event, many of his experiments destroyed the samples being used, so were not reproducible by outsiders. Nor was there any process of proper peer or external review of what he was doing. There was also evidence of the mixing up of exhibits, including ones from different crime scenes. One simply cannot say that the rejection of such evidence, or that doing so left a gaping hole in the prosecution case, was some sort of technicality. It was a fundamental flaw, one of which would have been clear to a more competent, and perhaps less zealous, investigation. Nor can one suggest that Eastman should be free today because of something only just found out. The risks and gaps were there before the prosecution, and the failure to see their significance, or to act on them, might be described as a matter of the forensic choice of the prosecution. If the consequence is that a possibly guilty man is walking free, that is not a consequence of his cleverness, or some quirk in the system, but of serious deficiency in the investigation, in the prosecution, in the conduct of the trial, in the way the appeals system so often fails, and in the failure of police to maintain an open mind, even after a verdict.........It is better, as they say, that guilty men walk free than that innocent people rot in prison. It is a matter that many ought to ponder that our system will let a man whose guilt has not been proved rot in jail for 20 years before a proper re-examination of the case. For that, perhaps, we are all a little guilty. A worry too that there appears already to be the gathering of some sort of lynch party to override the verdict, or to make a reintegration of Eastman into society impossible. That's a risk some politicians are already pandering to by suggestions that a pardon will not be contemplated."