08 June 2006

It's not really getting anywhere

So where does the McKie inquiry go from here? The Herald records the disagreement of the various experts:
"At the inquiry, experts from the Netherlands, the US, England and the Scottish fingerprint bureaux in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh were adamant the print did not belong to Ms McKie.
Against them, on the side of the four officers of the SCRO's Glasgow bureau and their supporting colleagues, there was a former police officer and veteran of the Yorkshire Ripper case who had been approached as a McKie defence witness for her perjury trial but became convinced it was her print at the murder scene.
Dutch expert Arie Zeelenberg argued he had found more than 20 points of clear difference between the print and that of Ms McKie and it should have been eliminated after as few as three discrepancies.
However, Peter Swann, an independent expert since he retired from the police 19 years ago, was initially hired by McKie's defence but ended up believing it was her thumb print. He was never called before the perjury trial.
He insisted there were 32 points of similarity, four times that necessary to reach a positive conclusion."
Seems to me like a no-score draw. If you were the chair of the committee (or more realistically the clerk), how do you reach a sensible conclusion for the committee's report? I suppose that you just push on, in the probably vain hope that the remaining evidence - such as that from Minister of Justice Jamieson - will shed a little light on the way forward. But at this stage, it is hard to see how the time-consuming inquiry will take matters on from where they stood at its start.

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