Recent content by Gallicrow

Thank God for that.

"Not proven" is actually quite a rare verdict, it happens in fewer than 1% of cases - see Not proven verdicts delivered from 2011 to 2016: FOI release - gov.scot

See No Comment! | Think Forensic "If you’re innocent, and have proof of this, there’s really no reason to give ‘no comment’ when interviewed; it’s common sense. But if you’re not innocent, or you have little evidence to prove you are, it seems uttering ‘no comment’ won’t necessarily save your...

Quite. All the "no comments" in his initial interview don't make any sense whatsoever if he didn't know anything about the crime.

I was on the jury for a murder trial many years ago (in England, not Scotland) and the very first thing we did was take a vote. If that had been unanimous, which it wasn't, I think we'd have been done and dusted in less than half an hour.

Conversely, if the prosecution didn't know that this was going to be an issue before the start of the trial, then they had no time to find witnesses or otherwise build a case that this affair was just a figment of the boy's fevered imagination.

Doesn't the fact that they swabbed all the bus shelters in the area suggest that they knew about the "I shagged TM in a bus shelter" defence before the start of the trial?

At the start of the trial I was completely certain that the boy would be found guilty, but if what has been reported on this site and others is anything like accurate, it seems that the prosecution have done an appalling job. I still think he'll be found guilty (and obviously personally I have...

I can't believe that the post-mortem wouldn't be able to tell the difference between damage done by a child being raped by a man and the damage done by being raped with some sort of tool (for want of a better word). At the very least I'd expect non-semen DNA to be all over the victim and the...

I'm worried about what effect it will have on the jury if the relationship between the boy and TM turns out to be true.

Was the boy's claim that he had sex with TM known to the prosecution before the trial? It seems to me that this was an "ambush" defence (made famous by the notorious James Hanratty case in 1962), which was outlawed years ago. If the prosecution didn't know that this would be the boy's defence...