Jodie Jones Conviction - When Is Specialist Knowledge Not Specialist Knowledge?

Looks like I was wrong in the Luke Mitchell case then. He was found guilty and will be sentenced next week. The trial judge Lord Nimmo Smith (for background – see Lothian and Borders Police – Evidence Of Shred) decreed that the exceedingly tenuous chain of circumstantial evidence,( more like a thread of dubious weave!) was sufficient to allow the jury to convict. The main cornerstone of this was the assertion that Mitchell had ‘Specialist Knowledge’ of where the body lay.

Now my understanding of this term as used in this context is being where a suspect displays knowledge to the police or others which only the killer could have known. So, for example, this would be relevant where a suspect gave information to the police about the whereabouts of a body not hitherto traced. This however, was not the way things were in the case of Luke Mitchell. He formed part of a group specifically motivated to search a path and an adjoining wooded area which he knew well and it was Mitchell, the only one accompanied by a dog, who found the body. Much was made of the fact that Mitchell left the group and climbed through a tumbledown wall into the wooded area and was alone when he found the body but I would submit that any other member of that search party climbing through the wall to continue searching could have come up with the same result and that consequently the trial judge was wrong to allow this part of the evidence to be considered by the jury as ‘Specialist Knowledge.’

I feel sure we will be hearing from Donald Finlay in the near future and it may well lie with the Appeal Court to examine this further.