THE ALGEBRA OF JUSTICE - Louise Woodward, Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, Jeremy Bamber

In any So-and-so versus So-and-so prosecution the jury is presented with an algebraic equation of information, and in order to get the right decision and avoid a miscarriage of justice, it is necessary to resolve that equation correctly and thoroughly. This being the case, the question that should be asked is, Why are twelve heads needed to do this equation, and how can they do it correctly if they don't know there is an equation there or how to do it? These equations could take days or weeks to resolve, yet the jury has time pressure to resolve cases within hours. To make matters worse, the public is largely addicted to detective fiction, which predisposes our juries to look for the fictional resolution of crimes. They are also TV addicts.

There are many reasons why our juries are more likely than not to go for the fictional resolution of the facts in criminal trials. Firstly, because a complete resolution of the equation is necessary for the truth to convince at all, and secondly, because the fictional view of a case is often the easiest to see and to communicate, and it is also the most persuasive and believable on first impression. And in a capitalist state, the economic psychology of the juries will be capitalist, so that if the jury cannot resolve the equation, it must default on that psychology. Capitalism exploits and so does its psychology. If capitalism itself resolved these cases, it would have the innocent put in jail and the legal system profiting from this, while the guilty would be left free to continue their activities for the profit of the journalists, police and legal professionals. The fictional resolution of cases, and miscarriages of justice therefore, generate business twice over for the officials who live by the justice system, and many recent cases show that the public wouldn’t care about the victims. This form of capitalism was satirized in Dickens’s Bleak House and it hasn’t changed.

Another inherent fault in the jury system is that in any case where the jury has difficulty in determining the truth of it, its resolution will drift away from the intelligence of the individual to the finding of the social group, and this will absolve all individuals in the group from responsibility in a wrong decision. The jury system therefore has a tendency towards mob justice where deductive intelligence of the facts is required.

In any Crown prosecution situation, the odds are stacked against a correct decision because the jury system, which is designed to use the public to evaluate issues that need public opinion, is not suitable for such cases. What we need is a system that uses an official equation resolver, someone who has the time and the ability to resolve an equation correctly and also to record his resolution of that equation for others to examine. This system must be perfect.

Another aspect of jury trials that we need to worry about is what sort of effect an inadequate jury system is going to have on the behaviour of our police in detecting and prosecuting crimes? If our juries are prone to go for the fictional resolution of any case put to them, then our police must, for their own convenience and for public need, adapt to this and be prone to mount prosecutions that suit the jury's psychology? The police often have a great deal of journalistic pressure on them to detect difficult cases and this corresponds with the time pressure put on the jury.

Despite the mounting cases of miscarriages of justice due to wrong jury decisions, it is still not possible to appeal on the grounds of jury error or misjudgment, and our justice system is so unjust that if a tenant of our jails persists in proclaiming his innocence (thus making life socially difficult for himself in prison with many crime types, and thereby confirming his sincerity) our justice system simply doubles his jail term so that he gets twice the sentence that he would have got had he been guilty. Our justice system justifies this on the grounds that the unlucky prisoner doesn't recognize his guilt.

Our jails are full of actors playing the part of criminals who have an impossible job of communicating the truth, while our juries are reading detective fiction omnivorously and everyone is making profit for the lawyers and their kind, and our real killers are out there doing likewise. Examples of these actors are Barry George, Sion Jenkins, Roy Whiting, Michael Brookes, Jeremy Bamber, Ian Huntley, Louise Woodward, Major Ingram, Gary Hart, etc etc.

We lost capital punishment because we could not be trusted to hang the right person, a problem that has troubled the conscientious since the hangings of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and James Hanratty. The very public that the jury represents is in favour of capital punishment yet its jury system is not capable of delivering to that public's satisfaction.

We need a justice system that guarantees a correct decision and the natural logic of information in these equations can provide this. An algebraic equation is a balance of natural ratios that enables us to determine the values of unknown quantities within a mathematical whole. The logic and behaviour of truth and untruth values in court equations behaves in the same way as the values of numbers in mathematical equations. The correspondence between the two forms of algebra is clear in the behaviour of liars and hypocrites, who reverse the values of information in court equations to hide the truth, and thereby create a mathematical balance problem that accords with the characteristics of a numerical equation. In any court equation one side is fictional or presumptive, and this is often the most persuasive interpretation of the evidence, and the other side is the truthful case, but this is usually hard to fix without doing the algebra, hence the other case.

In any criminal prosecution it is the fictional (or wrong) case that creates the equation and the need for it to be resolved, and both the fictional and factual sides have to be resolved for the correct decision to be made. The fictional side of the equation will always have a factor in the equation that carries the value of a malicious hypocrisy and this is important in helping to resolve these equations. This factor may be a malicious hypocrite or liar, or it might be a misunderstanding that forms the basis of a case against a defendant, such as a prejudicial misinterpretation of forensic evidence, as happened in the Sion Jenkins case, or else simply a mistaken prosecution. It is important to distinguish between the malicious hypocrisy factor and the benign liar or hypocrite, which has no effective value in an equation except to confuse the issue, as happened in the Timothy Evans case. The benign liar doesn’t always occur in these equations but he can attract suspicion and a prosecution.

Most benign hypocrisies are reflected hypocrisies, where an innocent person appears to be hypocritical but the source of the hypocrisy comes from without. There are several of these in the Timothy Evans case. Fear of the police can produce these. It is necessary to work out the causes and effects in such cases. When the police spot a reflected hypocrite, they tend to suspect him, while the real hypocrisy is harder to identify or pin down.

A point worth noting is that an innocent person finds it very difficult to relate to a prosecution case against him, and he is also recognizable for a willingness to make admissions and confirm points that may appear incriminatory to the prosecution case without his having to, and without realizing that he has done so. The innocent are naive, and they tend to see their salvation through the truth regardless of how things are misinterpreted by the prosecution. Another factor that can identify a benign or innocent party is a difficulty in explaining or making sense with his testimony, especially if his testimony is created or confounded by the malicious factor in the equation.

In a completed equation the algebra should reveal a symmetrical whole in which the truth, the evidence, the fiction, the hypocrisies and their motives should all be revealed in a logical relationship to each other. The resolution of these equations should have all the facts seen in relation to the whole equation and the equation seen in relation to all the salient facts, with all their natural values resolved. Algebra being what it is, it should not be possible to complete the equation erroneously. The resolution of these equations is just simple logic and a look at some famous cases will help to illustrate how the algebra works.

The Louise Woodward Case

In the Louise Woodward case, a young British girl (she was only 17) was working as a nanny in the United States when a baby in her care died of a head injury, and she was charged with first-degree murder. This charge implied intent. The prosecution case was that the injury had occurred at the time of death, but the medical evidence also indicated that it could have occurred days before.

The charge of first-degree murder was therefore presumptuous and very aggressive. It required the jury to believe firstly that the injury was sustained at the time of death and secondly that the injury was deliberate.

Woodward's reaction was simply to deny the charge against her, which eliminates the possibility of her knowledge of any accident or mistake that might have occurred, as she would have referred to it when defending herself against such a dangerous charge.

Again, when the judge offered her the second-degree murder compromise before sending the jury out to consider its verdict, Woodward rejected this and simply braced up to the only thing that appeared relevant to her, namely the first-degree murder charge, which she again denied. This put her in a most precarious position as her lawyers would have pointed out to her, and it rules out any possibility of either first or second-degree murder on her part as well, because she would then surely have accepted this offer. On her side of the equation we have what looks like innocence facing up to a dragon of a charge, and certainly we cannot find her guilty on this resolution.

The problem with this equation is its simplicity, as there isn’t anything else to cross-check by except the parents' side of it, and this doesn’t resolve itself fully because all the facts are not available. But it is interesting because the source of the aggression behind the first-degree murder charge seems detectable there. This source of aggression is apparent in the incident in which the father had come home one day and found the baby left unattended (Woodward was occupied doing the washing in the basement), and instead of finding out what she was doing or whether she was okay, the father worked himself up into a blaze, timing her absence with his watch, and then exploded to shocking effect when she did appear. His behaviour looks neurotic, the subject of this neurosis being the baby’s welfare, and the object of the aggression being Louise Woodward, and if we add this to the first-degree murder charge and its determined assumption that the fatal injury was inflicted at the time of the baby’s death, we can see a common source for the aggression and also for the presumptuousness behind the charge. In fact this incident and the charge itself are the only evidences of aggression in the whole equation.

Another interesting thing about the parents’ side of the equation is that the father under cross-questioning kept saying ‘Yes, sir’ ‘No, sir’ to the advocates while yet always addressing his answers directly at the jury. His behaviour looked like jury conducting, and it suggests pretentiousness before his questioners, which usually indicates liars and manipulators. Again, his behaviour in this is an indicator of the hypocrisy factor in the equation, as is the presumptuous charge.

The equation cannot be completed without further investigation into the father’s side of it. The nearest that we can get to finishing it is by supposing that he had had the accident with the baby himself, and that he was using the court and the police to help convince himself that his accident was not responsible for the baby's death. In fact there is evidence suggesting that such an accident may have occurred, and it is in the supposed hypocrisy itself: it is that hypocrisy in reverse. His hypocrisy being that he needed to believe that she rather than he had been responsible for the injury and that the death was not an accident. This would complete the evidence for the hypocrite in the equation, and it identifies the source of the aggression behind the charge also, as well as introducing the motive factor into the equation too.

On Woodward's side of the equation, there is no motive for her murdering the baby (unless she was a psychopath, for which there is no evidence), and there is no motive for her not referring to an accident if there had been one when defending herself against the murder charge, and there is no motive for her rejecting the judge's offer had she been responsible for the injury. The motive factor is negative throughout her side of the equation and there is no trace of a malicious or other hypocrisy either.

The other issue of the equation is the medical evidence, which fails to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the injury occurred at the time of death. The "shaken baby" idea was evidently a fabrication to justify the prosecution case.

The Louise Woodward case is not a good equation to begin with but I hope that its incompleteness will help to show what is required in their resolution. At least there is sufficient resolution to dismiss the charges of first or second-degree murder against Louise Woodward.

The Timothy Evans Case

In the Timothy Evans case, Evans’s wife was strangled by John Reginald Christie, but Evans had understood it to be an abortion accident. Fearing that he would get into trouble with the police himself, he agreed to Christie’s suggestion that he give Christie his baby for some friends of Christie’s to look after, and he went back to Wales to get his bearings. There, he went to the police and told them that he had disposed of his wife’s body in an abortion accident back in London. When he was taken by the police to London they showed him that his wife and baby daughter had both been strangled, and in his bewilderment and shock (and for reasons that shall be seen shortly) he confessed to the crimes himself. Then having realized what had happened, he started to accuse Christie. But the jury didn’t believe him and Evans was hanged.

Three years later, it was discovered that Christie was a serial strangler, and so in accusing Christie, Evans had known that Christie was a killer without knowing of the two bodies in the garden, and he clearly got this information from the murders of his wife and baby.

In the Timothy Evans case, we should know by now that he was innocent (although some heartless journalists still use a lack of public certainty to implicate him in the murders), but we also have the perfect equation for determining his innocence at his trial had we been able to do it. There are two aspects of the equation that we can double-check by and this allows us to determine everything very clearly and fully. These two aspects are motive and the issue of Evans’s reputation as a fibber. It was the latter that got him hanged.

At his trial Evans claimed that John Reginald Christie had committed the murders. Concerning the motive factor, Evans was asked why Christie should have murdered his wife and baby, and Evans said that he did not know. This means that the motive factor is negative on Evans’s side of the equation, for had he been slandering Christie to avoid conviction while being guilty, he would have known how to slander him with the motive too. But nobody understands a psychopath, and being the father of the baby he would have been emotionally unable to conceive the idea that anyone could murder his baby daughter just to get rid of it.

On Christie’s side of the equation the motive factor comes up positive however. It is fragmented and looks psychiatric, but it also identifies the hypocrisy element in the equation. The information comes to light when we examine Christie’s answers to questions about his activities at the time of the murders. Christie’s defence was of incapacity. He claimed that he had had enteritis, and that because of this he couldn’t take solid food, only milk, and he also said that he had had fibrositis (a back problem actually caused by stress and dragging the bodies about), and that he was so feeble that if he needed to pick up a pin off the floor he had to get down on his hands and knees to do it. In addition to this was a purely personal admission that had no relevance to the questioning at all, when he said elsewhere in the trial that his wife had accidentally spilled his milk on his bed. If we add all this up, what we get is a collective portrait of a man in the form of a baby, while in the infamous wash-house, the subject of the trial was a dead baby, which the killer had dressed in the form of a man, with Evans’s neck tie round its neck to incriminate Evans (it was his tie). And what is the exact opposite of a helpless baby whose mother figure accidentally spills its milk on its bed, is it not a ruthless mother and baby strangler? Christie’s responses to these questions were determined by the subject of the questioning, and it reveals his guilt and his motive, which was psychopathic.

We can double-check this with the matter of Evans’s social fibbing and his false confessions. It was put to Evans that the reason that he had confessed to the crimes was that it brought him relief to tell the truth. But the question that immediately springs to mind is, since when does telling the truth bring relief to a social liar? Surely the whole point of social lying is that it brought ready relief in situations that he couldn’t otherwise deal with, and this is the true character of his confessions. On Christie’s side of the equation, in addition to the hypocritical aspect of his personality which we can see everywhere, there was also a policeman’s uniform and duties that he had acquired while having a criminal record, which means that he would have lied to the authorities to get these, and there are his earlier frauds serving as a precedent for criminal lying too. And all aspects of Evans’s final account of the events accord with these factors. And Christie's previous conviction for an attack on a train corresponds with guilt in these murders as well.

Concerning Evans’s confessions, there is only one logical resolution for them in this equation, which is that in each case he had lied his way to the truth as he knew it then. The difference between the confessions that he made in Wales and in London cannot be interpreted logically as telling the truth first and lying later, as the two accounts don’t correspond that way (he didn't know about the death of the baby until he got to London). And his motive for lying his way to the truth in each case can be resolved too, because in the first instance it was his fear of Christie's word and the respectability of his policeman’s uniform, and in the second it was because it took him days to work out the unbelievable. He had had the same problem as the jury. Again, a sense of personal responsibility without guilt would have come from his giving the baby over to Christie to be murdered, as he had done previously with his wife.

The effective liar in this equation was Christie, who was a manipulative and criminal liar and whose behaviour created all the facts in this equation, including Evans's odd behaviour in giving him the baby. On Evans's side of the equation everything comes up negative and innocent, while Christie on the other hand comes up as guilty as, well, John Reginald Christie.

The Derek Bentley Case

Another interesting equation is the Derek Bentley case, which resolves into a completely different explanation for what happened on that roof than was seen at the trial. In this case, Derek Bentley and his friend Craig were seen on a warehouse roof at night trying to break in, and the police were called. There was a stand off because Craig had a gun which he used to keep the police at bay, and during this PC Miles was shot dead. The police couldn’t hang Craig because he was only fifteen, so they charged Bentley with murder, even though he had handed himself into police custody as soon as they had arrived. They used the testimony that he had called out ‘Let him have it, Chris’ to implicate him.

Leaving aside the legal issue that he was in custody at the time of the killing, this equation has two levels of contention to resolve it by, the first being the issue of whether Bentley had said 'Let him have it, Chris', and the second, as shall be seen shortly, whether Craig's gun was actually the one that killed PC Miles. In the first, I counted nine points that undermined the police claim that Bentley had said 'Let him have it, Chris', while on Bentley's side of the equation, there was just one point that contradicted his and Craig’s denial, and this was that the police were saying that he had.

The second issue of the equation contains a most perfect set of circumstances for assisting the equation resolver. This concerns the matter of whether Craig's gun had actually shot PC Miles. To begin with, only a brief second would have elapsed between the emergence of PC Miles from the stairs and his swirling round for cover behind the stair-head, and it was during this second that he received the fatal bullet. Furthermore, he would have needed to look round directly at Craig in order to receive the bullet between the eyes if it had been this gun that had killed him. Furthermore, Craig was 40 feet from the stair-head, and he would have had difficulty in seeing PC Miles too, because this incident occurred at night and in darkness. Furthermore, Craig's gun was a .455 calibre revolver, a most inaccurate weapon, and furthermore, the barrel had been sawn in half so that it could fit in his pocket. This means that the gun was useless except at point blank range. If this isn't enough, Craig was using .44 calibre bullets which were the only ones that he had. So not only was the gun wildly inaccurate but its power was relatively soft as well.

All these circumstances mathematically must rule out the possibility that Craig's gun had been responsible for the injury, and to double-check this we have to look at the other side of the equation, which would have the fatal gun in the hands of a policeman behind the stair-head. And here, all the circumstances fit together. The injury occurred at night and it suggests accuracy at relatively close range in the case of a revolver. And in the dark, the only aspect of PC Miles that would be visible would be the ghostly paleness of the face, which would only be seen close up, and it was this part of him that was shot. So, on this side of the equation, the logic has PC Miles startling a senior officer when he swirled round for cover behind the stair-head, and the senior officer firing at the thing that had startled him.

This resolution is supported by the forensic evidence, because the fatal bullet was not presented to the court as evidence while all of Craig's bullets were. And this resolution also explains why the police wanted to hang Bentley too, even though he was in their custody and was co-operating with them. He wasn't being blamed for the shooting of PC Miles but for the original burglary incident that gave rise to this accident.

The hypocrisy factor and motive in this equation are on the police side, and the murder in this case was not the subject of the trial but the object of it. This would not be a criminal issue but a professional one caused by the trauma and humiliation arising from the accident on the roof, and an inadequate justice system cost Bentley his life.

In his summing up, the judge, Lord Goddard, used an evil-looking knuckleduster that Craig had given Bentley to sway the jury against Bentley. The knuckleduster had a short spike on one end of it which looked intimidating. Unfortunately Lord Goddard was not able to realize that no one would actually use the spike on anyone, certainly not Bentley himself, and that the point of its design was to ward off any evil spirits among Craig's social group who could imagine someone using it. This gift was for Bentley's protection, but it didn't work on Lord Goddard or the jury, and it was significant in getting Bentley hanged.

The Jeremy Bamber case

Jeremy Bamber has been in jail for over twenty years, pleading his innocence, after his family was wiped out by a mass shooting at their home. His behaviour since his conviction has always been consistent with innocence, and the evidence at the crime scene indicated that his sister had gone mad with a gun and then killed herself. The police were forced to prosecute Bamber by pressure from the relatives. Bamber was an adopted son of the dead father and so did not belong to the family after this point, and there was a large inheritance involved.

The issue of the case that I would like to look at here is the word against word situation concerning the ex-girlfriend’s testimony. She testified that Bamber had told her that he was going to murder his relatives before the incident occurred, and this testimony is what secured his conviction. Bamber has always denied saying this. The two sides of this issue therefore look like this:

The ex-girlfriend's side: Bamber decides to murder his family and tells his girlfriend that he is going to do it, thus enabling her to report it afterwards, and then he shoots his entire family for the inheritance. Then he dumps his girlfriend, thus freeing her to come forward with her testimony, and this while the relatives were pressing for a prosecution against him. This side of the equation has her guilt in it (complicity with murder, because of her delay in giving the information) and also a motive for her giving the evidence as well (revenge), which is important when we consider the other side of the equation because it corresponds. It also requires us to believe that Bamber would dump his girlfriend while the police were suspicious of him and while he would need to keep her sweet and on his side because of such testimony.

The defendant's side: Bamber's family is wiped out, and (for reasons that will become clear shortly) he decides that in the light of this situation his girlfriend isn't suitable any more, so he dumps her, and in doing so he has robbed her of a share of his inheritance. She decides that if she can't have it then neither can he, so she comes forward with her testimony and thereby robs him of the inheritance too. This side of the equation suggests that her interest in Bamber was in his inheritance, and this explains why she had lost value to him after the shooting of his family. This resolution carries her guilt too, except that here the guilt factor is quite colossal. This side of the equation shares with the other side the guilt factor, and it shares the same motive for her giving evidence against Bamber too. Bamber’s behaviour in ending the relationship shows that he couldn’t have expected her testimony.

Another aspect of the case which helped to secure his conviction was the matter of the silencer, which was found by members of the family in the gun box under the stairs after the shooting, with allegedly the sister's blood on it. The point of the prosecution case was that the sister couldn’t have shot herself upstairs, where her body was found, then put the silencer in the gun box downstairs herself, and then returned upstairs to die. However, the sister shot herself twice, and the first injury was not incapacitating. She could well have removed the silencer between shots (and have needed to) to ensure a more effective aim in the second. The absurdity of the silencer works both ways. This matter suggests the house tidy psychology of a woman with children rather than an inept deception, which would have to be proved. If Bamber had murdered them all and left the rifle with the sister to incriminate her as the prosecution case alleged, and if he had been clever enough to remove the silencer so that the rifle would be short enough for her to have been able to shoot herself with the rifle, why would he be foolish enough to take the silencer away and leave it in the gun box downstairs? There is doubt that this was actually the sister's blood, and the fact that Bamber and the police together saw someone moving around inside the house before they went in adds to the absurdity of the conviction.

If the killer had used the silencer, it would have been for stealth and to reduce the incidence of escapees, and knowing that the silencer was needed, he would have left it by the sister for any such deception. In this equation the absurdity of the silencer in the gun box at least cancels out. Another logic factor in this equation that can be counted is that it would be a lot less likely for a sixth person to keep control over five victims in the house than for the sister to deal with four.

The logic of the equation shows that the ex-girlfriend must have been lying, or at least it discredits her testimony, and the same applies with the prosecution case regarding the silencer. It confirm's the original police view of the incident. There have been many such cases since, of members of the public going on the rampage with guns, and this phenomenon is caused by the effects of Thatcherism on the public's quality of life and on society.

Another interesting aspect of the Bamber case is that whenever he has protested his innocence in the public media since, the members of his father's family have promptly wheeled out an old aunt to contest his appeals, without showing any concern about the possibility that he may be in jail for something that he didn't do. Like the justice system itself, they are self-righteously living off the proceeds of what they themselves wish to see as his crime.

In this case there are two apparent hypocrites, the ex-girlfriend at the time of the trial and the relatives at the trial and since, and both appear to have Bamber's inheritance as the motive for the hypocrisy, so that this factor corresponds. The inheritance of the dead family has created the most appalling family values around Bamber while he has been confined in jail for twenty years protesting his innocence. There is no evidence of hypocrisy on the part of Bamber anywhere and he is evidently the innocent factor in it. In the equation of this case the ex-girlfriend is not innocent either way, and Bamber’s relatives also appear to be corrupted by his money, while Thatcherism protects this.

Resolving these cases as equations in this way fulfills the balancing act that is depicted in the symbolism that we use for courts of justice, namely the Scales of Justice. The logic of the completed equation is irrefutable because it is mathematically correct, and any error that is made in the calculation can be seen and corrected afterwards.

Our jury system is archaic, degraded by Thatcherism and exploitation, and it has survived many embarrassing miscarriages of justice. It is clearly not able to offer the practised intelligence that is needed to resolve these cases. The jury system is only suitable for issues requiring public opinion or matters concerning the interests of the public. Certainly a system of algebraic resolution is needed for appeals.

The prosecutions of Jeremy Bamber and Michael Brookes were forced on the police by public pressure, because in both cases the police were originally satisfied that the suspect was not guilty. This interference in their professional expertise and integrity has caused serious harm since, producing a trend in malicious prosecutions in recent years including that of Ian Huntley.

By David Dixon

Revising June 2008

For the Major Ingram case click here.

For the Lee Harvey Oswald case click here.

For the probable identity of Jack the Ripper, and an innovative account of the Whitechapel murders, click here.

justalgebra@yahoo.com