by GRAHAM SIEVERS, communications manager of Concateno
THE ROAD safety campaign charity Brake chose to highlight the dangers of both drink and drug driving as its main theme for Road Safety Week, which runs every November. Its campaign poster read: Not a drag; not a drop. Its website states that a sixth of deaths that occur on the roads are due to drink-driving, and that researchers believe the same is true for drugdriving.
Dr PETER L G JENKINS FRCPsych, consultant psychiatrist, outlines some of the salient issues in the development of expert witness testimony in the field.
MY WORK AS an expert witness started when I became interested in mentally disordered offenders and worked as a fellow in forensic psychiatry in the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. In that role I was exposed to the whole range of criminal behaviour and provided assessments of fitness to plead and determinations of mental state to assist the court in pleas related to the verdict of guilty but mentally ill and not guilty by reason of insanity. An interesting part of my work at the time also involved civil litigation.
by Dr BASHIR QURESHI FRCGP, FRCPCH, FFSRH-RCOG, AFOM-RCP, London: author of Transcultural Medicine; expert witness in cultural, religious and ethnic issues in litigation; Emeritus Vice President of the Royal Society for Public Health, UK
MY FIRST English Christmas, on 25 December 1964, was a white Christmas, in a true sense. I was born in India, medically qualified in Pakistan and started work in Whipps Cross Hospital, East London.
by JIM RENNIE
ANYONE WHO has ever passed an accident scene may have wondered: “How did this happen?” or “How did the vehicles get where they are?”
Accurate analysis of the crash scene and all available evidence is essential to enable the full picture to be appreciated. Ideally, it will involve a visit to the accident scene to obtain the data necessary to prepare accurate scale plans, take photographs of sight lines and visibility and, where possible, record any physical evidence which may still exist.
LORD BOWEN is attributed with this famous advice to a jury in 1903: “We must ask ourselves what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think.”
Just over 50 years later, in Bolam (1957), McNair J pointed out that this much celebrated man (probably on a horse-drawn omnibus at the time!) could not be expected to give a reliable opinion in a case where some special skill is exercised.
