Blog

We’re all aware of ‘dress-down Fridays’ at work – even we homeworkers, who find that our regulation T-shirt and chinos uniform is a bit formal for the pre-weekend frenzy.

In Florida, however, dressing down in the same colour can get you fired. That is what happened to 14 workers at a law firm in Deerfield Beach in the state, according to a report in the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The 14 had all taken to wearing orange on pay days, to make them stand out as a group when they went out after work they said.

There is still no end in sight to the battle between the Government and the legal profession over the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Bill. The fight has been mainly carried on as a rearguard action in the Lords, only to have the numerous amendments carried there overturned upon its return to the Commons.

Last week a ‘triumvirate’ of legal organisations issued a joint set of proposals that, they hope, will act as a compromise between the Bill as it stands and the aspirations of many lawyers to keep hold of at least some form of legal aid system in this country.

One issue that has been exercising both the legal profession and the expert witnesses that provide opinion in criminal cases has been that of Bayesian inference, or Bayesian statistics. Bayes, the 18th-century mathematician, produced a method for calculating the statistical probability of an event happening given more than one variable. It had been used in numerous trials to state the probability of a suspect being present at the scene based on the probability of other related events.

In 2010, however, a person convicted of murder took his case to the Court of Appeal to challenge shoe print evidence that had been used to convict him. The argument that had been used purported to show that a pair of Nike trainers owned by him must have made a shoe print at the scene of the murder.

Over the past few days the British (well, English) press has been full of laments over the weather. It actually has snowed in most places (how unseasonal, this being February!), and -160C IS cold for this country, but the TV pictures from around Europe really should stop us from going on about it. Even Rome had snow during the rugby international, which you would have thought would have suited England, but no matter.

Spare a thought for the people of Louisiana, then, who got caught up in the disastrous events following Hurricane Katrina. Not only did they suffer the indignity of having President Bush overfly the area on his way back from holiday, and Dick Cheney insist that power crews repair an oil pipeline substation rather than local hospitals, they were given temporary accommodation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in ‘trailers’ that were contaminated with formaldehyde.