Expert Witness by Anna Sandiford

fun because I like the unexpected — you never know what’s going to arrive in the post. Like the day a pair of soiled knickers fell out of an envelope onto the desk — a very unexpected onion indeed. Luckily, it wasn’t my desk. No, it was one of our personal assistants. She basically did all the non-scientific stuff in the office, including opening the post.On this particular day, she slit the envelope with the letter knife and — plop — out they fell! A pair of pale pink, soiled knickers, with a small note and a business card. It seemed that someone, somewhere, had been cheating on her husband, who was a lawyer. He picked up what he deemed to be an offending set of underwear, stuck them in an envelope with a disgruntled note and sent them off to us for ‘analysis’. The problem with that sort of approach is that there are all kinds of issues about continuity of the item, accidental contamination of the DNA because of handling by our unfortunate PA and anything the knickers might have soaked up on their way through the postal system. After all, it was a cold, wet, winter’s day, the envelope had been wet and the knickers were without any packaging save for said soggy envelope. Even if we did get a DNA result, what were we supposed to do with it? Without a reference sample from the disgruntled husband, we couldn’t interpret the results.
    Despite a few carefully worded messages left on the business card’s phone number (one has to be careful with message wording — one never knows who might be checking voicemails), we never heard a single thing. That in itself leaves a problem. We now have a pair of ownerless knickers sitting in the office. We can’t destroy them because they might be required as evidence. We can’t get hold of the owner or the client because there’s no answer on the phone or to our letters. What happens? In that case, I have no idea. As far as I know, those pink frillies are still in the office.
    Independent expert witnesses are nothing without solicitors and barristers. Without them, we don’t get any work. We rely on receiving full and accurate information from them becauseour work can only ever be as good as the information with which we are provided. As the old sayings go, rubbish in, rubbish out , you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and it’s quality, not quantity, that matters . We receive our instructions usually in the form of letters because this is the legal arena and everything should be documented and recorded. It’s important to remember at this point that lawyers have to act on their clients’ instructions, no matter what the lawyer thinks about those instructions. Lawyers can advise their clients but the client doesn’t have to take that advice.
    It’s always amusing when we receive bizarre instructions, which some times we don’t under stand, and even the solicitors don’t under stand. Take this letter we received in a drink-driving case, which included the phrase: To the line and also lies showed a lower reading of H2. Now, I know a fair bit about drink-driving cases but I had not the faintest idea what this was all about. After having read through the file, though, I could see where the problem had arisen. The breath-testing device that had been used was the Lion Intoxilyzer and the results of the two breath samples were 84 and 82. The sentence should have read, The Lion Intoxilyzer showed a lower reading of 82. When I rang the solicitor and read it to him, he said we had passed the test and he was just keeping us on our toes (and that he had a new secretary who’d never done legal work before and had never heard of a Lion Intoxilyzer).
    Then there are the instructions that are in the sort of code the police use for describing events. In this particular case, a defendant had crashed into a street sign when he failed to adequately negotiate a bend . We were advised that,