Noticeboard
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.8.4.248.60206 |
| Subject Matter | Noticeboard |
248 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF (2004) 8 E&P 248–261
NOTICEBOARD
Notices should be sent to Rosemary Pattenden, School of Law, University of East
Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. E-mail: R.Pattenden@uea.ac.uk
Expert evidence—United Kingdom, Australia, United States
The United Kingdom is said to lead Europe in the number of CCTV cameras. This may
explain why the Court of Appeal is the first court in the common law world to have
had occasion to consider the admissibility of expert evidence about the content of a
conversation captured on a silent video. The police, customs and the intelligence
services have been using the services of lip-readers for some time to decipher
conversations which have been seen and recorded but not heard. In 2002 Sussex
police used a lip-reader to catch a rogue solicitor who tried to smuggle a package
with a syringe loaded with heroin to his client in the cells of Haywards Heath
Magistrates’ Court. Initially the solicitor claimed that he had thought the package
contained a message from his client’s girlfriend, but confronted by the lip-reader’s
evidence of what was said during a private conversation with the client which the
prison service had recorded on video, the solicitor admitted the offence and pleaded
guilty (Daily Mail, 1 June 2002, p. 16). Since the dialogue was made in furtherance of
a crime, it was not protected by legal professional privilege. Subsequently the same
lip-reader appeared as a prosecution witness in two unrelated contested criminal
prosecutions in which conversations between an accused and co-accused had been
captured on CCTV. In one of the trials the defence also called a skilled lip-reader. The
video in this trial was of poor quality and there were significant differences between
the lip-readers about what was said. Both trials resulted in convictions and in a
consolidated appeal, R v Luttrell [2004] EWCA Crim 1344, the appellants argued in the
Court of Appeal that lip-reading evidence founded on video footage is so intrinsically
unreliable that it should be inadmissible. This argument was supported by expert
evidence that many spoken sounds do not involve lip movements while many other
sounds involve the same or similar lip movements. The Court of Appeal, however,
decided that lip-reading evidence is admissible in principle: it satisfies the tests for
admissibility of expert evidence (including the ordinary test of reliability) and is
capable of being relevant ([2004] EWCA Crim 1344 at [38]). Like facial mapping
evidence, it is a species of real evidence. The fact that it may fall well short of perfection,
the court said, is a matter going to its weight and to whether the judge should
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