www.sclomax.co.uk

Innocent is a Manchester based organisation offering support to many of those who claim to be the victims of miscarriages of justice. The following review is taken from the Innocent website (www.innocent.org.uk):

WHO KILLED JILL DANDO?
The Case of Barry George
by S. C. Lomax
paperback 203 pages
Kempton Marks 2005
£9.99


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The main evidence against Barry George when he was convicted of the murder of Jill Dando in 2001 was that of an eye witness, Susan Mayes. She testified that she had seen George in the street in which the victim was killed, on the morning of the day she was killed. She picked him out at a video parade and said she was 'very sure' that the person she had picked was the one she had seen between 6.57 and 7 am on 26 April 1999 in Gowan Avenue, Fulham.

S. C. Lomax analyses meticulously this and all the other evidence used to convict George. He finds many reasons why this item of evidence is not compelling. The witness had seen the person she identified as George at least three and a half hours before the crime was committed. That's right: the key witness did not claim to see the man who later became a suspect in the act of committing the crime, or even around the time when the crime was committed, but three and a half hours before then [note from S. C. Lomax - it was actually four and a half hours before the murder].

And although she was 'very sure' she had identified George as the person she saw at the video parade, this parade was conducted on 5 October 2000, 17 months after the event. With the image of the person she had seen apparently still fresh in her memory, she chose a man with long and untidy hair, although in her statement to the police at an early stage in the investigation she said the man she saw had 'a short and smart haircut.'

This was the high point of the case against George. Lomax's careful analysis shows that, although the witness says she saw the person later to be identified as George for 'five to six seconds', she probably had a clear view for only two seconds.

What other evidence links George to this crime? A tiny fragment of single fibre, half a millimetre long, which might have come from George's clothing, or from many, many other possible sources; and a particle recovered from a pocket of a jacket at his home, 0.0125 millimetres across, which had the same composition as the residue left from the single gunshot that had killed Jill Dando.

But this particle might have come from other sources, such as a firework, or through contamination due to careless handling of the exhibit by police officers. The judge was obliged to tell the jury that this evidence was not good enough to stand on its own, but could only be used to corroborate other evidence.

Nothing else links George to the scene of the crime or the crime itself. This minimal evidence was bolstered by evidence of George's obsessions, an interest in guns earlier in his life, and his attempts to account for his movements on 26 April 1999 when he was first questioned by the police a year later. Having cast doubt on the alibi evidence he put forward, the police and prosecutors were able to represent his answers to them as lies. They said he was concocting a false alibi to cover his involvement in the crime.

S. C. Lomax carefully records the prosecution case before subjecting it to an analysis which convincingly destroys it. His precise account of what is known about the crime and reconstruction of the police investigation, now updated to include the appeals and the evidence currently being submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, does not make easy reading: this is no page turner. But anyone who reads it all will be left with no doubt that the disorganised person of low intelligence who is serving a life sentence is not the person who planned a murder with precision, like a professional contract killer, using a specially adapted firearm - the kind of person who must have carried out this crime. That person is presumably free to kill again.


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The question that isn't answered in this book is why anyone, such as the ordinary people who were members of the jury that convicted George, could conclude that this minimal evidence was enough to make them sure that Barry George had killed Jill Dando. In many miscarriage of justice cases, such as that of Susan May, evidence is so miniscule and so compromised that a simple recitation of it leaves the reader uncomprehending. How can anyone be convicted on such rubbish?

The case of Barry George illustrates what can happen. Items of evidence that are literally minute - a two second glimpse, a fibre 0.5 mm long, a speck invisible to the naked eye, events that have scarcely happened, things that can be wafted about by any disturbance of the air - are caught, fixed, and preserved by witness statements and sticky tape, and authenticated by officers in uniforms and men in white coats who fill in forms, so that things which in our day-to-day lives we might regard as highly questionable are given weight and seriousness.

Confronted by such evidence, suspects like Barry George try to provide explanations. The failure of such explanations is nothing to do with whether the suspect is of low or high intelligence. Intelligent, well-informed suspects such as Susan May or Sally Clarke are equally vulnerable. Inevitably there were inconsistencies between what George remembered of how he spent a morning a year before he was asked about it, and the memories of his potential alibi witnesses. Set in witness statements by the police, those inconsistencies became evidence that George must be hiding something, and that he was resisting the police investigation. They created more evidence against him, perhaps key evidence in the minds of the jurors. Perhaps they thought 'there's no smoke without fire.'

If you buy and read this book and as a result ask questions about how evidence is produced by the police in such a way as to convince grown up people who ought to know better, then your £9.99 will have been well spent.