PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "She is further astonished that statisticians were never brought to court by the defence to explain the probability of deaths in an overworked ward of extremely ill babies. Many credible scientists, she writes, question the initial premise of the charges on this analysis. “Why the defence chose the strategy they did is almost unfathomable,” she writes. “The jury did not hear alternatives that would perhaps have better equipped them to make up their minds based on balanced information.”
-------------------------------------
SUB-HEADING: "Did Lucy Letby have a fair trial? In An Expert Witness, the writer and academic is on a mission to improve the standard of forensic science in criminal trials,
GIST: "Let us start with the emerging field of penis identification. Sometimes I feel ashamed of the unwholesome interest I have in Sue Black’s work, but mostly the shame is overwhelmed by my awe for the difference a magnificent human being can make, furthering science for the cause of truth, decency and justice.
Black is one of the world’s most esteemed forensic anthropologists, made a dame for her services to victims and their families in the wake of crimes, conflicts and natural disasters ranging from the Balkan wars to the tsunami in Thailand. Out of gore, she brings nobility.
At 65 she has left her Scottish research post and is a member of the House of Lords and the president of St John’s College, Oxford. To the public she is best known for her books All That Remains and Written in Bone, bestsellers recounting her career. In this third book, An Expert Witness, she writes that when reporters entered the sumptuous palace in Damascus of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad after he fled in 2024, they found a copy of All That Remains on his shelf.
Was Assad training his sights on her? After all, a decade previously Black had been flown to the Middle East to give her expert opinion on a leaked cache of images showing 11,000 men allegedly killed in Assad detention camps. Or was Assad, like so many of us Black fans, Val McDermid, the Scottish crime writer, among the most famous, drawn to the macabre? “I’m not sure,” Black writes, “how I feel about being the bedtime reading of a dictator.” I’m not sure how I feel about being in a book group with Assad.
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But it is Black’s fierce moral mission that makes sense of everything she does. In All That Remains she speculates that this passion for justice came from the “dark and lonely childhood place” of being abused as a girl. This tremendous feeling for the vulnerable flashes through An Expert Witness, which is subtitled Forensic Science on Trial and is part memoir, part history of the fallibility of forensic techniques, like graphology and lie detectors, that have been discarded and the blunders she has seen in 35 years of giving evidence in British and international criminal courtrooms.
In her analysis the British court system can still be too reliant on expert witnesses arrogantly peddling pseudoscience or lawyers mysteriously failing to seek the advice of the right discipline. She is damning about the trial of the former nurse Lucy Letby. Given its “vague wisps of evidence”, she wonders if the Crown Prosecution Service “should ever have taken the case to court”. She suggests the judge “could have considered dismissing it on the basis of how thin the evidence was”. Lucy Letby witness ‘should have told jury about other explanations’
She is further astonished that statisticians were never brought to court by the defence to explain the probability of deaths in an overworked ward of extremely ill babies. Many credible scientists, she writes, question the initial premise of the charges on this analysis. “Why the defence chose the strategy they did is almost unfathomable,” she writes. “The jury did not hear alternatives that would perhaps have better equipped them to make up their minds based on balanced information.”
Black has spent her career trying to rectify this lack of rigour in her indomitable manner, inventing whole new research bases if necessary. This led her to sitting outside a court for hours with a man for whom she was a defence witness after spending considerable time examining photos of his penis.
\He had been charged with sending an indecent image, which he denied. His solicitor sent Black photos of his client’s penis because Black was the pioneer in penis identification research. She proved, for instance, by logging images from a database that, when erect, only 4 per cent of penises deviate to the right (compared with a quarter to the left). This defendant was lucky: the penis in the indecent image had a rare “double dorsal” vein as opposed to the normal single upper-side vein of the defendant. Case closed and an innocent young man walked free, mouthing thank you to Black.
This kind of anecdote seems cheerful enough until you understand why Black had to establish the penis research base: the rise of indecent images of children. In these images, criminals often only show their hands or penis — identify the penis and you have the criminal. In 2022 more than 70,000 cases of sexual abuse against children were reported to the police, “eight cases of abuse every hour”, she writes.Sue Black: I’ve seen pure evil up close, but it’s fine by me if you can’t resist true crime
Black cites as her hero a young girl who went to the police to tell them that her father was abusing her at night. This 2006 case was a “turning point” for Black. In the 19th century there was an epidemic of poisonings that led a scientist called James Marsh to perfect a test for arsenic. Likewise, in the 21st century, Black says, new science was needed by police. Showing “singular bravery”, the girl in this case made a secret video of her abuser that showed only his hands, like so many child sexual abuse images.
Black’s sense of injustice fuelled what would become a lifelong research project into whether vein patterns on hands were robust enough to be used as evidence. Much later, in 2018, she would be part of establishing the largest databases of hand photos (many volunteered as part of citizen science) in the world, using AI to “get to a probability of a million to one” that a suspect and offender are the same person based solely on the look of their hands.
Finally, a breakthrough for victims, and the forces of good. This research has, Black says, secured hundreds of years of prison time for abusers, including life sentences for some of Britain’s most prolific paedophiles.
Most of the first half of this book is Black narrating the history of forensics, in which, thanks to popular fiction from Sherlock Holmes onwards, the public is a little too trusting. She cheered when in the 1980s DNA testing was accidentally discovered by the British scientist Alec Jeffreys, a game-changer that put good science at the heart of the criminal justice system. Much of what came before was hocus-pocus by comparison.
Yet that system is still flawed. The first half of this book is cogently argued, but not classic Black, making it a less compelling read than her first. The book comes to life when Black is at her most outraged. We have the case of a mother whose baby had died in the 1970s. The baby’s coffin felt featherlight and together with other clues this made her suspicious that doctors had stolen her son’s corpse for their research ambitions.
For decades that mother campaigned to expose the practice of doctors retaining baby parts without consent. Forty years on she won the right to exhume her baby’s coffin. Black was brought in, and at first light in the cemetery, indeed found no signs of a body, only an empty blanket neatly rolled up with a crucifix inside. The fact that a fragile blanket was preserved but no teeth nor bones made Black’s expert report pretty conclusive.
Yet the police assembled a team of forensic experts citing all kinds of questionable “science” (the scare quotes are Black’s) to conclude that Black was wrong and a baby had been buried. The police dropped the case. Some years on the mother, by that stage terminally ill in hospital, was visited by NHS officials, who presented her with some slide samples of her son’s tissues, in a supermarket plastic bag.
The case of the girl who captured the hand video? The jury found her father not guilty despite Black showing that the vein pattern on his hands was a match for the video. It was a verdict “so outrageous and so unfair it made me want to scream”. The prosecutor said the jury probably didn’t believe the girl because she didn’t cry giving evidence. “This,” Black writes, “is not justice.” Black fervently wants this woman to make contact with her. Black would let her know that it was her courage that inspired Black to wield new science to save countless souls. This is quite the legacy.
An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial by Sue Black (Doubleday £22 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Black is one of the world’s most esteemed forensic anthropologists, made a dame for her services to victims and their families in the wake of crimes, conflicts and natural disasters ranging from the Balkan wars to the tsunami in Thailand. Out of gore, she brings nobility.
At 65 she has left her Scottish research post and is a member of the House of Lords and the president of St John’s College, Oxford. To the public she is best known for her books All That Remains and Written in Bone, bestsellers recounting her career. In this third book, An Expert Witness, she writes that when reporters entered the sumptuous palace in Damascus of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad after he fled in 2024, they found a copy of All That Remains on his shelf.
Was Assad training his sights on her? After all, a decade previously Black had been flown to the Middle East to give her expert opinion on a leaked cache of images showing 11,000 men allegedly killed in Assad detention camps. Or was Assad, like so many of us Black fans, Val McDermid, the Scottish crime writer, among the most famous, drawn to the macabre? “I’m not sure,” Black writes, “how I feel about being the bedtime reading of a dictator.” I’m not sure how I feel about being in a book group with Assad.
Books newsletter
News, reviews, author interviews and suggested reads from our literary editors. Sign up with one click
But it is Black’s fierce moral mission that makes sense of everything she does. In All That Remains she speculates that this passion for justice came from the “dark and lonely childhood place” of being abused as a girl. This tremendous feeling for the vulnerable flashes through An Expert Witness, which is subtitled Forensic Science on Trial and is part memoir, part history of the fallibility of forensic techniques, like graphology and lie detectors, that have been discarded and the blunders she has seen in 35 years of giving evidence in British and international criminal courtrooms.
In her analysis the British court system can still be too reliant on expert witnesses arrogantly peddling pseudoscience or lawyers mysteriously failing to seek the advice of the right discipline. She is damning about the trial of the former nurse Lucy Letby. Given its “vague wisps of evidence”, she wonders if the Crown Prosecution Service “should ever have taken the case to court”. She suggests the judge “could have considered dismissing it on the basis of how thin the evidence was”. Lucy Letby witness ‘should have told jury about other explanations’
She is further astonished that statisticians were never brought to court by the defence to explain the probability of deaths in an overworked ward of extremely ill babies. Many credible scientists, she writes, question the initial premise of the charges on this analysis. “Why the defence chose the strategy they did is almost unfathomable,” she writes. “The jury did not hear alternatives that would perhaps have better equipped them to make up their minds based on balanced information.”
Black has spent her career trying to rectify this lack of rigour in her indomitable manner, inventing whole new research bases if necessary. This led her to sitting outside a court for hours with a man for whom she was a defence witness after spending considerable time examining photos of his penis.
\He had been charged with sending an indecent image, which he denied. His solicitor sent Black photos of his client’s penis because Black was the pioneer in penis identification research. She proved, for instance, by logging images from a database that, when erect, only 4 per cent of penises deviate to the right (compared with a quarter to the left). This defendant was lucky: the penis in the indecent image had a rare “double dorsal” vein as opposed to the normal single upper-side vein of the defendant. Case closed and an innocent young man walked free, mouthing thank you to Black.
This kind of anecdote seems cheerful enough until you understand why Black had to establish the penis research base: the rise of indecent images of children. In these images, criminals often only show their hands or penis — identify the penis and you have the criminal. In 2022 more than 70,000 cases of sexual abuse against children were reported to the police, “eight cases of abuse every hour”, she writes.Sue Black: I’ve seen pure evil up close, but it’s fine by me if you can’t resist true crime
Black cites as her hero a young girl who went to the police to tell them that her father was abusing her at night. This 2006 case was a “turning point” for Black. In the 19th century there was an epidemic of poisonings that led a scientist called James Marsh to perfect a test for arsenic. Likewise, in the 21st century, Black says, new science was needed by police. Showing “singular bravery”, the girl in this case made a secret video of her abuser that showed only his hands, like so many child sexual abuse images.
Black’s sense of injustice fuelled what would become a lifelong research project into whether vein patterns on hands were robust enough to be used as evidence. Much later, in 2018, she would be part of establishing the largest databases of hand photos (many volunteered as part of citizen science) in the world, using AI to “get to a probability of a million to one” that a suspect and offender are the same person based solely on the look of their hands.
Finally, a breakthrough for victims, and the forces of good. This research has, Black says, secured hundreds of years of prison time for abusers, including life sentences for some of Britain’s most prolific paedophiles.
Most of the first half of this book is Black narrating the history of forensics, in which, thanks to popular fiction from Sherlock Holmes onwards, the public is a little too trusting. She cheered when in the 1980s DNA testing was accidentally discovered by the British scientist Alec Jeffreys, a game-changer that put good science at the heart of the criminal justice system. Much of what came before was hocus-pocus by comparison.
Yet that system is still flawed. The first half of this book is cogently argued, but not classic Black, making it a less compelling read than her first. The book comes to life when Black is at her most outraged. We have the case of a mother whose baby had died in the 1970s. The baby’s coffin felt featherlight and together with other clues this made her suspicious that doctors had stolen her son’s corpse for their research ambitions.
For decades that mother campaigned to expose the practice of doctors retaining baby parts without consent. Forty years on she won the right to exhume her baby’s coffin. Black was brought in, and at first light in the cemetery, indeed found no signs of a body, only an empty blanket neatly rolled up with a crucifix inside. The fact that a fragile blanket was preserved but no teeth nor bones made Black’s expert report pretty conclusive.
Yet the police assembled a team of forensic experts citing all kinds of questionable “science” (the scare quotes are Black’s) to conclude that Black was wrong and a baby had been buried. The police dropped the case. Some years on the mother, by that stage terminally ill in hospital, was visited by NHS officials, who presented her with some slide samples of her son’s tissues, in a supermarket plastic bag.
The case of the girl who captured the hand video? The jury found her father not guilty despite Black showing that the vein pattern on his hands was a match for the video. It was a verdict “so outrageous and so unfair it made me want to scream”. The prosecutor said the jury probably didn’t believe the girl because she didn’t cry giving evidence. “This,” Black writes, “is not justice.” Black fervently wants this woman to make contact with her. Black would let her know that it was her courage that inspired Black to wield new science to save countless souls. This is quite the legacy.
An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial by Sue Black (Doubleday £22 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
