AS REGISTERED experts with the police national database of expert witnesses Audio Video Forensics (AVF) has extensive experience over the past 14 years of working with police agencies, military clients and legal firms as an enhancement bureau and in an expert witness capacity at Crown Court and Old Bailey level.
The most recent cases in the Old Bailey for AVF involved being engaged by the defence as the video and audio experts in the trial of Levi Bellfield and for the prosecution in the trial of Thomas Hughes. Linking the two cases together was the fact that the Metropolitan Police team engaging AVF on the latter case was the same team prosecuting Levi Bellfield.
It is not unusual, of course, for expert witnesses to work for both prosecution and defence, but certainly interesting to be doing so at the same time. Both cases had difficult challenges in comparison work, detailed video and audio analysis and, of course, (for defence) careful study of the prosecution experts’ evidence to look for ‘holes’ in the evidence/evidence chain, the accuracy of the prosecution expert’s report and to conduct independent comparison and enhancement work to draw our own conclusions. This is where having extensive experience of working with the police can come in extremely useful as, (for the prosecution) you learn how far you can push the boundaries of what can be useful evidence and also to be mindful of what can be leading or misleading.
In the area of covert audio enhancement we feel that we are at the top of our game in terms of extensive experience and, having access to the most cuttingedge technology available, we have successfully enhanced and transcribed audio from probe/surveillance audio recordings which was previously thought impossible. That is an area where we are utilised extensively by defence teams to analyse and verify the accuracy or otherwise of the prosecution work in both audio and transcription. Having worked in the research and development department of Oscar-winning pro-audio manufacturer AMS-Neve, developing audio mixing desk technology for the film industry gave invaluable knowledge and techniques in the area of audio and has made the crucial difference in clarifying evidence that may otherwise have been discarded as inaudible.
Presenting such evidence to a jury in court can be difficult due to the nature of noisy audio containing difficult and/or distressing content, but the advantage of this type of evidence is that ultimately the jury can make its own mind up about the material by careful repeat listening and ultimately using the evidence as a ‘guide’: our work being a method of speeding up the perception process.
Subtitled evidence, of course, is subjective – be it for the defence or prosecution – but the same rules apply as before. Ultimately the jury can understand and form its own opinion on such evidence, unlike the nature of more scientific or cognitive forensics.
For the military we have undertaken work on high-profile jobs such as the investigation into the death of the ITN journalist Terry Lloyd and also the Daily Mirror’s Iraqi fake photograph story, resulting in the dismissal of editor Piers Morgan. Those cases both presented challenges, technically and analytically. For the Daily Mirror fake photo there were major time pressures due to the nature of the accusation against the army, and therefore there were Ministerial demands to resolve it rapidly. Forensics by nature is not a fast process; however, needs must and in that case the speed with which the newspaper decided to run with the story without authenticating the pictures ultimately led to the departure of the editor.