Expert Witness (14 page)

To address the first possibility, we ask people to undertake a breath test before we get started, just to make sure they blow zero. In the case of this particular man, he provided a zero breath reading, as required. After he'd drunk his early morning vodka he asked if he could nip down the road to get a paper, because he hadn't realised there'd be so much sitting around with nothing much to do. My colleague, being a trusting sort, agreed and so off went the man down the road. Ten minutes
passed and he hadn't returned; more time passed, no man. So my colleague went into the street to see if he could find said stray man, and there he was, round the corner, face down on the street, reeking of medication and booze. As it turns out, the man had decided he wanted his breath alcohol elimination rate to seem slower than average, so he'd brought some horse liniment in his jacket and was swigging it while he wandered off to the paper shop. Seeing as horse liniment wasn't made for human consumption, it had a bit of a bad effect on him and he passed out. My boss called an ambulance, which pretty much called a halt to the breath alcohol experiment. The testing procedures were adjusted accordingly; subjects who come for breath alcohol testing are now kept in sight the entire time they are ‘in test conditions', including being accompanied to the toilet, should their need be pressing.

After many years of working in forensic science, I still maintain that alcohol-related cases are the most complicated, because of the calculations, how many things have to be taken into consideration and the sheer range of variables. However, they are also among the most interesting, because it's amazing what people do when they've been drinking.

T
his story starts as a common-or-garden drink-driving case. The solicitor's instructions described a defendant who was an alcoholic, in the true sense of the word. She'd driven her monstrous four-wheel-drive vehicle down a country lane at four in the afternoon while soaked to the eyeballs in lunch-time (and possibly breakfast-time) vodka. On her jolly little sojourn, she'd side-swiped a cyclist and, because of her erratic driving and general careering into hedgerows, he was able to keep up with her until she got home, which was a caravan in the garden of a burnt down house. The cyclist, being an assiduous sort, called the police and waited for them to arrive, all the while keeping an eye on the caravan and its occupant. While waiting, the cyclist saw what turned out to be the driver's daughter arriving in another vehicle, enter the caravan and then the police arrived.

In due course, I received instructions regarding what the driver said she'd drunk before driving (two glasses of wine in the pub) plus what she said she'd drunk after she got home (1
¹
/
²
litres of vodka in 20 minutes) before the police arrived. Based on what she said, her breath alcohol level would have been below the legal limit at the time of the driving incident,
so I was asked to attend court to give evidence for the defence. This was where it got weird.

The trial was to be heard in a lovely semi-rural court with easy parking, good sandwiches and a nice jewellery shop over the road. I arrived at the appointed and standard 9.30 a.m. to find an ambulance outside. Thinking nothing of it, I made my way into the court building and made myself known to the people with the clipboards.

I then went to see if I could track down the barrister. This is often a challenge because it's not unusual to be instructed by someone I've never seen and vice versa. I eventually found a tall, solid-looking man pacing around and talking on a phone to someone about event organisation, who seemed to be insisting that yes indeed, pink champagne was a must, given the colour of the dress. Turns out that the barrister in question had a parallel career, which was apparently far more interesting than the case at hand.

After he'd finished ordering white lilies and pink carnations for a sixtieth birthday he was also organising, I asked him where the defendant was. Time was ticking on, we should be getting into court and generally speaking it's barristers who fuss about the time, not me. ‘Oh,' he said casually, ‘that's her in the ambulance outside. She fell over in the road on the way in — pissed.'

I was a bit shocked at this because if a person is up in court for drink driving, even the most hardened soaks try not to sup anything before the trial begins, certainly not until the lunch break, although there was another case when court security had to physically carry the defendant out of the pub after the lunch break and into the witness box to give evidence. But here
was our defendant, being carried into court by the ambulance staff. I assumed they'd ship her off home or into rehab or something, but they didn't. They carried her into court and put her in the dock because she couldn't do it herself, yet astonishingly they considered she was fit to stand trial.

Next thing you know, she'd been carried out again because there was a fight in our court room. The case before ours involved two rival families and they were trapped in a small venue with nothing but hormones, rage and plastic seats between them. Police from a waiting riot van charged through the front door and into the court room, accidentally knocking over our drunken defendant who, to be honest, could have been knocked over by a strong wind. Several feuding family members were removed by the available police, but not all of the family members because there were too many. In fact, one of the family took a real dislike to the prosecutor for trying to put his brother in prison because of his anger management issues. This necessitated leaping across the court room, through the doors and grabbing the prosecutor in a vice-like grip around his neck in the foyer of the court. By this time, all the police officers were otherwise occupied with various relatives, so that left the court security officers — one tall, skinny and looking about 12 years old, the other one shorter and not moving fast, either by design or lack of desire.

I've often hoped no trouble would kick off in court because I don't want to see security guards take down a crazed family member. Defendants are less of a risk because they're generally contained or restrained in some way and have the focus of the police on them. I didn't hold out much hope for a timely and helpful intervention by the security guards but luckily
for them, the enraged family member decided to let go of his captive, possibly as the result of the growing enlightenment of imminent arrest if he was caught doing it, or more likely because of his girl friend kicking him in the left buttock and shrieking, ‘Kev, stop it you stupid fuck — you'll get arrested. I ain't lookin' after the kids on me own wiv you in a fuckin' cell.' Kev let go.

After the feuding squabblers had been removed or left under their own steam, the prosecutor, under standably, asked for an adjournment of 30 minutes to get himself together. The defence barrister didn't challenge it, mostly because he was on the phone discussing the relative merits of strobe lights against disco lights.

It's 11 a.m. and we're finally under way. I'd asked (admittedly two hours ago) if I could sit behind defence counsel during the trial so that I could hear the relevant evidence. This is often permitted in drink-drive cases because the evidence that is heard before me is material to the calculations I undertake and the conclusions I reach. If any of the evidence is different from the instructions I used to undertake my calculations, my overall conclusions could be different, which could have a major impact on the outcome of the case, some thing that has happened on many occasions.

Being present in court at the very outset can be very revealing, as in this case. Defence counsel requested that the trial be adjourned to a future date on the grounds that the defendant had been found face down on the main road this very morning, not through any fault of her own but through the sheer stress of it all. The bench indicated it was disinclined to acquiesce to his request given that the matter had been
adjourned several times before. Lo and behold, the cheeky bugger got up and said the previous delay had been due to his expert witness failing to submit her report on time — twice. I wouldn't mind if it had been true but I'd only been instructed three days beforehand and this case had been going on for over a year (and I've never submitted a report late). I involuntarily raised my eyebrows over the back of my head, which caught the eye of the bench who, in turn, indicated that perhaps the expert herself might have some thing to say about that. And I tell you, I could see from the tensing of the barrister's back muscles as the realisation washed over him from his toes to his head and back again that he'd totally forgotten I was there.

Finally, the first witness was called. It was the officer in charge of the case. I was mildly amused with his description of the argument that had taken place about the defendant's dog. When he'd arrived at the caravan, she'd insisted that her dog had to come with her to the station because it was very stressed and couldn't be left alone. The policeman had failed to see any sign of a dog but after a brief search, he and a colleague found a pile of fur that seemed to have once been some kind of animal but had the outward appearance of being dead. The defendant refused to leave without it so they actually took it with them — it had to be carried because it was unresponsive. She also had no shoes and had to be assisted to the car because she wouldn't walk on her own without shoes. There was no indication of where her shoes were or if any were ever found or even how she'd got from her car to the caravan in the first place.

The officer giving evidence was a physically rounded chap who pretty much read out his statement from his pocket notebook. I'm used to my instructing lawyers turning round
to ask my opinion about some thing so when defence counsel turned in his seat towards me I leaned forward; I wasn't aware that the officer had said anything with which I could assist but maybe I'd missed some thing. I had to strain to hear what the barrister was saying, which again was not unusual. What I could finally make out was a soft, lilting rendition of
Who ate all the pies? You fat bastard, you fat bastard. Who ate all the pies? You did, you fat git.

Many things charged through my head at that point, in no particular order:

• You're a fine one to talk, you're not so slim yourself.
  
• He's facing me, which is away from the bench. I'm facing the bench so I can't laugh.
  
• The bench thinks I'm having a serious conversation with defence counsel so I have to look serious.
  
• What a totally unprofessional tosser.
  
• Shit, I hope no one can hear this idiot singing because he's onto the second verse.
  

I kid you not, and it didn't end there. Next witness for the Crown was the cyclist who'd been side-swiped. After the original incident, he'd got out his paper and pen and written it all down, including times. This looked very good and he was a very credible witness, until it became apparent that he was just very slightly obsessed with this case — dates, times, names for every single court attendance, letter, communication he'd witnessed or received or made in relation to the matter, pages and pages of it committed to memory.

At the time of the incident, he'd followed the defendant and
tried to talk to her at a road junction, at which point she had made it very clear (it was apparently more of a slur) that she had no interest in talking to him. I think from memory her exact words had been
piss off.
No matter, he gave his evidence and we all moved on and the rest of the Crown case passed pretty much without incident.

Then it was the turn of the defence. The barrister called the defendant's daughter to give evidence. One of the first questions was, ‘What time were you in the pub with your mother?'

‘About seven, we had chicken and chips for dinner,' came the answer.

I tried not to look up at anyone else, so I sneaked a peek from the corner of my eye to see what the prosecutor was going to say about that, because the police officer had just given evidence to say that he'd arrested the defendant at 4.45 p.m., two hours earlier than the daughter was now saying. The prosecutor was still visibly rattled about his near-death experience and never even noticed. The story then became even stranger, with the daughter saying her mother never drank vodka, even though the police had just produced two empty vodka bottles as evidence seized from the defendant's caravan, where she lived alone, at the time of her arrest.

When cross-examining her, my barrister asked her if she was sure about the time, to which she replied yes, and qualified it further by saying she'd heard the six o'clock news come on before she'd left the house to meet up with her mum. Sensibly, the barrister didn't push but turned round to me and said, ‘We're fucked,' before promptly calling the defendant to give evidence.

Now, defendants don't have to give evidence in their own trials if they don't want to, and I was a little confused as to why the barrister would think it was a good idea, given the problems he'd had so far. His reasoning seemed to be that there was nothing left to lose and if it was this bad now, how much worse could it get? He hadn't banked on the defendant getting lost between the dock and the witness box. The defendant had been in the dock for the duration of the trial. The dock was a simple square delineated by low wooden sides and a gap where you entered or departed. There was also a bench for sitting and stairs down to the cells. When she was asked to come up to the front of the court to the witness box, she got confused and instead of coming out of the open gap, she set off down the stairs into the cells and the court clerk had to go and fetch her. Then she had trouble getting into the witness box. To be fair, it was a precarious affair, perched at the top of a set of small, tight, winding steps, but she couldn't negotiate them on her own and they were too narrow for someone to help her, so she crawled up on her hands and knees.

The details of her evidence aren't important, except that she managed a few choice words in her description of the cyclist. He, in turn, muttered constantly throughout her evidence, occasionally snorting loudly, shuffling his papers and ticking things off on what I can only assume was his timeline of events; every time she said some thing that must have disagreed with his list he'd mutter just loud enough to be heard but not so loud he was reprimanded.

The defendant was asked about the time she'd met her daughter in the pub and she maintained it had been lunch time, despite her own barrister pointing out that she now
had the chance to adjust her account because she'd heard her daughter's evidence and perhaps the police were incorrect about their time of her arrest. According to her, no, it had definitely been lunch time, she had no memory of what her daughter had just said and, by the way, her dog was definitely alive at the time she was arrested.

At the end of her evidence, the court clerk had to go up into the witness box and prise her out, assisting her down the stairs in the same way parents do with small children who have climbed too high and scared themselves into a panic.

It was my turn after that and when I got into the witness box and looked back into the main court area, the prosecutor and bench were sitting there like stunned mullets, not sure whether to believe what was happening, the cyclist was snorting, ticking and shuffling and the defendant promptly lay down in the dock and fell asleep. After all that show, my evidence was comparatively boring.

Once I'd given my evidence and had been released, I fairly ran out of the court, because quite frankly, I had no desire to be dragged back into
The Twilight Zone
. Anyone who saw me driving home would have seen a bewildered-looking woman who spent her whole time shaking her head and saying, ‘Can you believe that? Can you
believe
that just happened?'