Jansus said
Also just read about the fact that the defence had some reports that were not presented in court because of funding the expert witnesses. So wrong on many levels.
For a number of years, we could not understand why the defence had not mounted a robust attack on the basis of forensic evidence (or lack therof.) We were offered some vague mumblings about "not being too hard" on various witnesses, so as not to "put the jury offside", which seemed to us, at the time, absolutely ridiculous. I couldn't think of a case in which a jury was more likely to have been "put offside," given the nature and duration of media coverage, the locality of the trial etc.
Anyway, it came to our attention that there
had been an opportunity to have the forensics tested for the defence, but Legal Aid had been refused and (bizarrely) the legal team were allegedly saying Luke's mother had refused to pay for the tests.
You can imagine our confusion. If a case is being funded by legal aid, then the accused or his family cannot pay for anything independently, otherwise, they are deemed to be able to afford their own defence and should not be entitled to legal aid payments. Further, I knew for absolute certain that no-one in Luke's family had ever been asked to pay for tests - they would have done so without a moment's hesitation, had they been asked. It took another 4 plus years for us to get to the truth - that the legal team claimed SLAB had refused funding, whereas SLAB insisted that the legal team had failed to complete the application. From the case papers, the latter
appears to be the case, in that communication from the legal team to the SLAB appears to suddenly and abruptly come to an end, but given that the file at the SLAB offices has since been "lost" we may never know.
It is an absolute disgrace, in a country where so many people are entirely dependent on state funded and provided legal representation, that this sort of thing can happen. From what we have been able to glean from the case papers, it appears Luke's own defence team were dishonest and misleading not only to him and his family, but to others, in what can only be seen as an attempt to discredit Luke and his family in order to cover up for failings within the defence team.
For Lithium's benefit, I will point out here that I have made no direct accusation - I am doing what judges encourage every juror at the end of every trial to do - to come to common sense conclusions (or, in this case, possibilities), based on the evidence before them, without resorting to outright speculation.
