Time to let Mark Lundy go.

As one of many that haven't followed the Lundy case it always seem that there were obvious hallmarks of a Miscarriage of Justice, it always seemed that there had been undue weight of the fact that he was a 'bad husband' to an extent that fact was 'compensation' for a case with serious flaws in the continuity of evidence.

Following the Privy Council hearing into the case this week the answer is clear Lundy should be let go. The dramatic revelation by the Crown of a letter held on the file secretly for over a decade has, in my opinion destroyed the case against Lundy, a case which was always on one leg anyway and which required a number of near impossibilities to conveniently collide in favour of the prosecution. The letter tell us that the Crown always knew there was recorded on their files a review of the dna sample 'found' some 59 days after the murders of Lundy's wife Christine and daughter Amber. The letter recorded the opinion of nueropathologist, Dr Heng Tong, that the dna was too degenerated to be reliable as to his source or origins and that Lundy should not be convicted on the strength of the cell slides he saw. Enter Officer in Charge of the case Detective Sergeant Grantham who applied for funding to visit a DNA expert, Dr Miller in the United States. Why he needed to go in person is odd and a cynic might believe it was to give Grantham the chance to explain his opinion of Mark Lundy and his 'feelings' about the evidence and what was further needed.

Dr Miller, dear chap, was able to contradict the opinion of the nueropathologist Dr Tong using a novel system of analysis, a immunohistochemical procedure that hadn't been used in the same manner before, it appears only to have been used once in a trial since the Lundy trial and it's safe to say it is unlikely to ever been used again. Particularly so because 3 Professors, all experts in immune-histochemistry, swore affidavits that Miller's methods were fundamentally flawed and, that as Dr Tong had said over a decade earlier, the samples were so downgraded that it was impossible to reach any conclusion of their physical origins.

Grantham would later say that because of Dr Tong's prognosis it was necessary for him to get Dr Miller's opinion. A sceptic would say that Grantham was simply looking for evidence to support his 'position' on the case, otherwise he would have accepted that evidence from Dr Tong should have been made available to Lundy's defence lawyer. Why the Detective Sergeant didn't do that can't have been because of his confidence in Dr Miller's new method, but rather a lack of confidence supported by the revelation that it appears there has only been one other use of the procedure which has led to evidence being given in another trial. The three experts who swore affidavits presented to the Privy Council on the flawed processes of Dr Miller have no doubt sounded the death knoll on the credibility of Dr Miller, no doubt those opinions will relegate his career to having been that of the judicial equivalent of a gun for hire.

I can only imagine the conversations between Miller and Grantham and the lack of objectivity displayed by the Detective Sergeant who, even if he had brought into the 'mad science' of Miller, should have, without question, revealed the prospective evidence of Dr Tong over a decade ago - something which in other jurisdictions, or even within New Zealand should result for calls to have a Conspiracy to defeat the course of Justice investigated.

The 'mad science' didn't stop there in the Lundy case. There was also 'witch sniffing' of a sort where  Dr Pang a pathologist for the police relied on his nose to note the 'distinctive' lack of smell of the stomach contents of the victims to pin point the time of deaths. So confident was he about his nose and 'sniffing' powers he didn't take core temperature tests of the bodies (possibly the most reliable method - but a routine procedure nevertheless,) nor did he weigh the stomach contents in order to be able to scientifically calculate the degeneration of weight due to the digestion process - a far more precise method than the nose of a police pathologist.

So we have brain matter that was found 59 days after the murders, and of which there is no reliable proof that it is in fact brain matter. I'm unaware of how the 'brain' matter was missed for 59 days but it is a characteristic of Miscarriages of Justice that things miraculously 'turn up' in difficult investigations to help gain convictions, 'miracles' that police don't question the validity of but merely accept it as proving their 'gut feelings.' We have literal 'witch sniffing' provided by a pathologist and finally the 'computer' use time (Bain case revisited? - same 'expert' I understand - Martin Kleintjes) being dissolved in favour of Mark Lundy.  This after years of relying on an unproven 'hint' or 'professional opinion' that the remarkable Lundy was not in a different city when his wife and child were killed.

The Crown have no proof that Mark Lundy is guilty, yet he has proof that the Crown withheld evidence and used 'mad science' in order to convict him. Time to let him go.