Review: Identification: Investigation, Trial and Scientific Evidence
| Published date | 01 July 2012 |
| Author | Roderick Bagshaw |
| Date | 01 July 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.2012.16.3.409 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
REVIEW
Paul Bogan QC and Andrew Roberts
IDENTIFICATION: INVESTIGATION, TRIAL AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE,
2nd edn
Jordans (Bristol, 2011); ISBN-10: 1846612365, pbk, xli + 536pp, £60
A substantial proportion of criminal appeals in England and Wales, and no doubt
elsewhere as well, argue that identification evidence ought to have been excluded
altogether, or at least that the trial judge’s directions with regard to it ought to
have been significantly different. Only a small fraction of such appeals are
successful, but the application of well-established principles to a wide variety of
situations provides the authors of this book with a major task of cataloguing and
analysis. One of the notable achievements of their book is the concise and authori-
tative survey of appellate case law that it provides, organised in a general
structure that separates the phases of generation of identification evidence,
disclosure, admissibility and exclusion, then jury directions.
Code D largely defines the scope of the chapters dealing with the generation of
identification evidence, and the authors usefully summarise and gloss its most
significant provisions. (A full version of the Code is included as an appendix.) But
the breadth of the chapters dealing with admissibility and jury directions reflects
the fact that almost any variety of evidence might be relevant, in some circum-
stances, to showing that the person who committed the relevant acts was, or was
not, the accused. Thus alongside comprehensive accounts relating to the focal
forms of identification evidence, these chapters contain fairly brief presentations
of a much wider range of evidence law doctrines, such as those governing the
admissibility of bad character evidence and hearsay, when an adverse inference
can be drawn, and the jury directions that must be given when the prosecution
relies on an accused’s lie. An undertaking to cover the admissibility of all forms of
evidence that might be relevant to the issue of...
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