Almost a month after having his home raided by police, Jim Bates has spoken out about the situation.
Please bare in mind that this is a very one-sided article. It could be considered very biased against law enforcement.
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I would like to revive this thread, considering the recent news where chief constable Colin Port of Avon and Somerset Police Force, refuses to comply with court order to return seized hard drives.
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My understanding of this story is
Jim Bates purports himself to be a forensic expert
He is used in several cases to assist law enforcement
He gets discredited
He is asked to be expert again in case by law firm
He is allowed to copy CP
Law enforcement raids house and seizes 87 HDDs, presumably containing CP
Has he been charged?
What was the extent of his deception?
What were the circumstances of his discretization?
If you get discredited, how would you deal with it (be it for past acts, current deception, or malicious smear campaign)?
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for the link, jhup, I missed that article earlier in the month.
Jamie
No you didn't D
FF's RSS feed sent me this morning to an almost identical article, but it requires registration. (I detest registration. evil )
What was the extent of his deception?
What were the circumstances of his discretization?
If you get discredited, how would you deal with it (be it for past acts, current deception, or malicious smear campaign)?
What are your thoughts on this?
According to published reports, he lied under oath about having a university degree. The judge who sentenced him did not believe that this in any way affected his expert opinions but the damage was done. If any person of established credentials needs to perjure his or her self about something so trivial, then it calls into question under what other circumstances would such a person decide, again, to lie.
Disclaimer I don't know the gentleman and am only repeating what I have read. My comments pertain to any professional in the sense that lying under oath is something that you can almost never undo.
In my professional experience, however, judges in the US are not as likely to label it perjury when an expert gives contradictory testimony in a case, even if the contradictory testimony is proof that the original testimony was untrue. I had a case where another expert claimed, on the stand, to have performed a particular examination but on subsequent deposition admitted that he hadn't. The judge chalked it up to faulty recall even though the expert had been adamant in direct exam that he had done the examination.
In the US, once you have been disqualified as an expert (which is hard to do unless you are an obvious fraud), it is very hard to be requalified. The big reason that more charlatans are not disqualified in our profession (IMHO) is that most judges don't have the technical knowledge needed to spot junk science when it comes to computers. For many of the judges that I have been before, computer forensics is something akin to particle physics. And where there are conflicting opinions as to the significance of an observation, they are likely to let the jury sort it out.
FF's RSS feed sent me this morning to an almost identical article, but it requires registration. (I detest registration. evil )
Hmmm, you're right - it didn't require registration when I read it earlier before posting!
Jamie
With respect to Mr Bates, I think there are bigger issues here than his personal circumstances. If it is true that the Head of a UK Police force is willing to go against a court order, this sets IMHO a dangerous president. Since when has it been the job of the police to decide if decisions made within the court system are correct? It may sound a simple statement to make, but I always regard it as the police's job to establish the facts and present them to court. The court then makes their own decision (going back to the seperation of powers theory in my A level government here),
if the police are willing to test this, then they may end up being in contempt,
very interesting, Just my 2p worth
The policy issue at stake here that's guiding the chief's decision is that if he follows the judge's order, he's knowingly distributing child exploitation material to someone who shouldn't have it. The chief in this case should quite rightly appeal the decision, and not return the drives until the appeal is decided.
I've seen plenty of cases where the case itself was dropped, but a court order was obtained to wipe the drives prior to return because of the presence of contraband.
Reading into the case I can even see why the judge said the disks need to be returned, apparently the police forgot to mention that Mr Bates hard disks contained documents that will be used by the defense.
How is the police meant to have access to that and the defendant expect a fair trial?
The content of the main site inquisition21.com gives away most of the background to this story and the types of people inolved - NOT being judgmental in any way.
Read the contents of their articles and form your own opinions.