Luke Mitchell and the murder of Jodi Jones

Then Mr Turnbull has effectively edited out the time it took to view the house from the movie.
 
The route Mrs Bryson took from the Co-op to the house is quite uncertain, and there was a discrepancy between the time on her receipt and the time the transaction was recorded by her bank that was never resolved. Given that not that much time had elapsed between that day and her account of it to the police, it's very surprising that she didn't remember her movements more exactly.

In contrast she remembered the two young people she saw at the end of the path in remarkable detail, considering that even driving away from Easthouses she could only have seen them for a few seconds (and not at all if she was driving towards Easthouses). What is also remarkable is that her description of the young man (not a boy - remember, Luke was only fourteen) was nothing like Luke, and also that more and more improbable detail was added to her statement in additional interviews. Things she simply couldn't have seen as the driver of a car going round a bend at around 30 mph.

Mrs Bryson's husband's relationship to the Jones family and his involvement in the case, apparently dating back to the day after the murder (or even the night of the murder, I'm not sure), is also something I don't entirely understand. She's not the arms-length party she's presented as, for sure.

Nevertheless, if we take it all at face value with no imputation of ill-will, Andrina Bryson saw someone else at the end of the path around an hour later than the time the prosecution wanted it to be.

There's also the issue that the time the police want the sighting to be is also the exact time of a call made from Luke's phone. Mrs Bryson didn't say anything about a phone, the young man she saw was talking to or arguing with the girl.
 
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This is another passage from the transcript of Mr Turnbull's closing: "But one of the criticisms of that was made during the cross of David Stirling was that it was ridiculous to suggest that anybody would be wearing a parka in June, especially if he had been cycling up a hill, he'd be boiling hot." Mr Turnbull also mentioned that Mr Stirling could not remember what his companions were wearing. At the risk of repeating myself, the August photograph (which Mr Turnbull later mentioned) of showing Luke wearing a parka is a distorting factor. Mr Turnbull made the point that not all of the parka witnesses were cross-examined, and one wonders about the reason for that. The crown did not produce a receipt for a parka purchased previously to the murder (neither did the prosecution produce cell phone triangulation data that might have located Luke's whereabouts to a few hundred meters. That evidence would have been much more convincing.
 
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Mr Turnbull said, "One the advantages of of Mrs Bryson's evidence is that we can identify, with considerable accuracy, just what time it was that she was driving past the top of the path. It must have been between ten and five and five o'clock." Among other things this ignores Mrs Bryson's getting lost.
 
In Berger v. United States Justice George Sutherland's decision read in part, "He [the prosecutor] may prosecute with earnestness and vigor-indeed he should do so. But while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one." This 1935 is obviously not binding on other countries, but surely the principle is utterly sound. I have been thinking about this quote as it pertains to Mr Turnbull's summation.

In 1940 Justice Robert Jackson wrote, "The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen's safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility."
 
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A blogger (gentlewren) wrote a comparison between the Lockerbie prosecution and the prosecution of Luke Mitchell. "The case for full disclosure of laboratory case files | Law Society of Scotland - By Professor Allan Jamieson, Carrie Mullen. Pay attention to the third paragraph."

This article appeared in 2011. The third paragraph: "Of all UK jurisdictions, only Scotland has laboratories owned and operated by the police, under the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA). Is it coincidental that this is the only jurisdiction that refuses to fully share, as a matter of “SPSA policy”, the case files generated in the examination of physical evidence to obtain, for example, DNA profiles? It would appear that Scottish accused are being deprived the same access to scientific critique of the Crown scientist’s opinion as those in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Can this be just?"
 
I posted the following two paragraphs previously, but I am reposting it to highlight the name of Timothy Valentine. Here is a link to his statements regarding the William Gage case. He wrote that 17.5% of mistaken eyewitness identifications involved more than one eyewitness.

The BBC Frontline documentary apparently had access to the original police statements from Janine Jones and her boyfriend Steven Kelly, who along with Alice Walker and Luke Mitchell, formed the search party on the night of 30 June 2023. Starting at about 21 minutes into this documentary, the statements are compared and contrasted to the testimonies. These discrepancies are consistent with my recollection the discussion of this topic within Dr. Lean's book, and their existence undermines a major plank of the prosecution's case. Professor Tim Valentine is quoted at several points in the documentary including this one. One wishes that an expert in eyewitness identifications had given evidence at the trial, but I am unaware of any such testimony.

One point that came up in the Knox/Sollecito case was that the prosecution's theory required that the two accused be criminal masterminds at some points and complete idiots at others. That is true in the present case as well. A hypothetically guilty Luke Mitchell would be very foolish to go up to the body unprompted. Instead (and assuming that he wished to participate in finding the body for some reason), he should have insisted on obtaining a piece of Jodi's clothing to present to Mia, his Alsatian dog who was being trained to track.
 
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It's the same with the Lockerbie story. Megrahi was at the same time a terrorist mastermind who was able, apparently, to levitate an invisible suitcase on to an aircraft without going anywhere near it, but inside that suitcase he had placed brand new, easily traceable clothes he had bought personally only a couple of weeks previously in a shop only three miles from the airport, while travelling openly on his own passport, and without even putting on a false beard.
 
This is my attempt to type a small portion of Professor Busuttil's testimomy, which is available on-line. The part below comes from the second day. DF is Donald Findlay.
DF: Could you just describe what you’re doing please?
PB: Yes. If I’m holding it tightly, it can be, there might be enough pressure holding the knife-perpendicular almost to the mouth-to be able to reach as far as the tonsil.
DF: Yes. You’re showing it grasped between your thumb and two fingers, or mab the end approximately one inch of the handle; is that right?
PB: That’s correct. That would be so, yes.

This portion of the cross examination concerned the wounds to Jodi Jones' tonsils versus the size of a knife (I believe label 589). I am no expert, but I have to wonder whether it is likely to hold a knife in this way during an attack.
 
He's the professor who was in charge of the Lockerbie post mortems. I'm not aware of him skewing any finding there, but on the other hand nobody was trying to persuade him to do that, in that case.
 
Perhaps he just answered the questions that Mr Trumbull put to him, as opposed to shading his testimony. One of the reasons I posted the exchange is because Samantha Lean's book is pretty accurate in its description of this portion of the testimony.
 
From the John Smyth blog: "Mr Turnbull: 'If the assailant was behind her when the young girl was low down at the wall and her throat was cut several times, is it conceivable she has collapsed on to the wall and down to the ground as the artery has been severed?'
Mr Scrimger: 'It is one possibility.'

It cannot be a possibility for one simple reason. If she had collapsed against the wall and down to the ground then both would have been soaked in blood. Other than the two markings on the wall there was no blood at the foot of the wall or on the ground. It had to have been there if what Turnbull suggests is what happened. There is simply no ignoring this. Where was the rest of the blood? The young girl’s throat was not cut in the area near to the wall as other than the two blood markings there was nothing else. After the cutting of the throat there would have been extreme blood loss that should have soaked the base of the wall and the ground in front of her whether or not she was kneeling or sitting down near it. She must have been killed somewhere else and then moved to the location where she was found."

I previously pointed out the great loss of blood as being problematic for the hypothesis that Jodi was killed where her body was found.
 
The Scotsman reported, "Dr Kranti Hiremath, 49, said it was part of her duties as a forensic medical examiner to attend police stations and examine the victims of crime and suspects...He co-operated fully. She checked for any injuries, and saw an abrasion on each of Mitchell’s shins. The more recent was between 24 and 48 hours old. Mr Findlay asked: "There were no injuries that had the appearance of being received in the previous 12 hours?" Dr Hiremath said: "No." She added that she had taken fingernail scrapings from Mitchell, which would be submitted for analysis to test for blood or other material."
 
Rolfe said:
There's no doubt at all that whatever Mrs Bryson saw, she was driving away from Easthouses when she saw it. It's impossible to see anything there if you're driving towards Easthouses.
Click to expand...
In his summation Mr Turnbull said, “The next most important area or adminicle of the Crown case is the evidence of Andrina Bryson. And again this is important evidence from her. One the advantages of Mrs Bryson's evidence is that we can identify, with considerable accuracy, just what time it was that she was driving past the top of the path. It must have been between ten and five and five o'clock. More probably between ten to five and five to five. And the way we can do that, of course, is by starting from the known time of the Switch transaction at the supermarket and once we have that, all we need to know is the time to drive from the supermarket to the area of Easthouses and that’s been done. So, unusually perhaps, in this case, but in any case, rather, we are to bet a very precise time for an event which happened."

One person with whom I debated this case asserted that Ms Bryson was driving away from Easthouses, but it still happened at the time asserted by the prosecution. One problem for this is that it puts Ms Bryson back at her house at roughy 5 PM or a little after, which is in the range of 45-50 minutes prior to when she said that she arrived home. My question is whether there is enough time for her to get to the end of the path. It would be helpful to know how long she viewed the house, for example.
 
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She didn't view the house. She only drove to it and looked at the outside from the street.
 
I think there is too much time between the end of the shopping trip and her arrival home to account for easily. Some of that time might be because the supermarket till receipt is actually the correct time.
 
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The whole thing is irrelevant, because the people she describes weren't Luke and Jodi anyway. The description of what she saw has also grown a lot in the telling, because even travelling south it's not possible for someone driving a car round a bend at 30-40 mph to have seen everything she says she saw. But whoever she saw and whenever she saw them, she was going south. You can't even see the path entrance if you're going north. I actually went there one afternoon and there's no doubt at all about it.

By the time she was driving back from Easthouses, I think Jodi was already dead according to the police scenario.
 
The testimony of Dr. Kranti Hiremath is now available. She took fingernail scrapings from Luke. This is noteworthy for two reasons. One is that the lack of blood or DNA is mildly exculpatory evidence. The other is that this indicates that Luke was a person of interest at the time of the exam, approximately 6:30 AM on 1 July.
 
In some ways I am ploughing old ground, but I like nailing these points down with transcripts, rather than with newspaper reports. This also shows that Craig Dobbie was...mistaken...when he claimed in a 2005 newspaper article that Luke did not become a suspect until alleged inconsistencies appeared in his accounts, which happened on 3 July.
 
He was quite obviously a suspect, in fact the only suspect, from the moment the cops arrived on the scene. Indeed, almost certainly before that. It's absolutely astonishing how early they jumped to the conclusion that he did it. Regardless of what Craig Dobbie says.

It's an interesting parallel with David Gilroy. I think it's likely they hadn't seriously considered him as a suspect up to the point of the phone call at Lochgilphead. But even then they were probably aware that his behaviour was a bit odd. After it took him a couple of hours longer to get back from Lochgilphead than it should, though, cogs were definitely turning.

By the time he was being questioned in the police station at Corstorphine he was absolutely definitely a suspect, he had to be, but they still persisted in declaring that he was only a witness to justify not cautioning him and not giving him the opportunity to get a solicitor. I think that was the basis of his appeal.
 
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