Spectral Evidence : Criminal Law Conference

I will show you a short video, then talk about three forensic issues, text analysis, spectral evidence and that which is not memory. 

I do not condone any contact with the private parts of children beyond what is needed to wash them.  Like everyone in this room, I do not want my kids touched. 

I am concerned about zealotry, sadism, hysteria, separation of the powers, justice, the presumption of innocence, and the language that defines all juvenile sexual activity as abuse. 

I am concerned about laws that make victims of girls  who like petting, and criminals of their slightly older partners.  There is a world of difference between sexual assault and consensual but illegal relationships between young persons and grown ups, between exploitative fondling and sadistic rape,  I need these linguistic distinctions to practice psychiatry. 

I investigate cases for criminal litigation, Victims’ and common law compensation and child custody in family law.  I have treated paedophiles in prisons as well as people who tell me that they were abused in childhood. 

I have dealt with allegations of sexual abuse in a school playground between four year olds at play.

Videos attached to this submission.  This refers to the shorter video.

The first part of my video shows a nurse lecturing authoritatively, from her personal experience, to a group of psychologists and counsellors about satanic cults in Australia.  We are told that they live in our community, could be our church-going neighbours in Yass who, ritually satanically abuse their children from a very early age while drugging them to prevent them from remembering. 

Ruth Christie’s activities have been part of an campaign of education promoted under the auspices of NSW and other state departments who have funded many conferences on ritual satanic and other sexual abuses.  Ruth is responsible for the training of hundreds of therapists including the one in the second part of the video.

Ms Christie boasts that police call her to give expert evidence to identify abused children.

Video

The second part of the video shows women who have alleged that their parents and others abused them sexually.  They believe that they are receiving and giving ‘treatment’ for having been sexually abused. 

I would say that they are being hypnotised, exorcised and suggestions of abuse are being implanted.

Collectively, these women have utilised thousands of police hours and millions of dollars in health care and legal costs.  They have gone up in police helicopters to identify where ritual satanic abuse had occurred. There will still be the devil to pay when they sue their therapists as they do in the United States.

One of these women you have just seen was successful in convicting her father: he died in prison.  I am not allowed to identify her because of a Supreme Court suppression order which denies her surviving family justice. 

I can report that I rejected her claim for victims compensation some six years before this video was filmed.  It was too late to reverse her father’s conviction.  Hers was very obviously a fabricated memory case.  I now know that Ruth Christie had treated her.

Twenty hours of these tapes were given to me by a women who has since repudiated her beliefs and reconciled with her family.

Sexual abuse counselling remains widespread, mainstream and this institution still advertises its counselling activities on its web sites. 

As these videos are records of sexual abuse counselling, they would not be available to the defence of the many persons these women have accused. Because of Mr Shaw’s legislation protecting sex abuse therapy from disclosure, Australia remains in the grip of a recovered memory epidemic.  In the United States, the  therapists are paying out millions of dollars in thousands of negligence suits and have been doing so for three years now.

Text analysis

Much of forensic linguistics is common sense.  We need to know exactly how  a complaint came into existence to know if it a fantasy or a report.  Its reliability can be deduced from studying its origins and its form and from finding out if the speaker labours under a psychiatric disability.  Farrell v The Queen confirmed that an expert can be called on a complainant’s reliability. 

An accuser who tells you about conversations that took place when she was not there is telling a story.  She is not reporting an event.   This is an area where expert advice on her diagnosis and reliability can be useful.

Spectral evidence

The term ‘spectral evidence’ originated in Salem after 1692.  Twelve year old Abigail Williams and her cousins implicated 61 year old John Proctor and thirty other people in witchcraft which included coming by night in the form of a succubus to copulate, poison and beguile. 

As more and more people were accused, less and less was actually observed.  No one had seen the witch in their vicinity. 

Clerics, judges and laymen were intimidated, scared of appearing soft on witchcraft.  In that political climate, the disparity between allegation and evidence was not attributed to lying, nor even to hysteria on the part of the accusers. 

The courts constructed a notion that it was not the person of the witch, but the spectre of the witch, not her body but her ghost, her spectre, that had performed the reported acts. 

This was termed ‘spectral evidence’.  It refers events which should have been manifest but remained inconspicuous.

Fondling leaves no traces.  No one knows what happened between two people so long ago especially if one of them denies it.  However you can be certain that some episodes did not take place as reported when such happenings would have been obvious to people around at the time, but no one saw anything.  Sexual activity of any intensity leaves its traces, hairs, smells, stains, emotions.  People get caught at it.

I will report on some cases from my own experience. At the age of thirty, while learning about child sexual abuse, a woman developed the notion that her father had abused her throughout her childhood.  A marital breakdown had led to her getting therapy in a sister institution of the one in the videotape, staffed by a social worker. Her father was bewildered as were her estranged mother, sisters and brothers. Family photographs showed two parents, four happy kids with cousins and friends.  She reported having had an abortion, but the hospital had no records of it.  When she was fourteen, her mother ran away with another man but the daughter had elected to stay with her father. She supported his custody application for the other children in an affectionate affidavit.  She had no recall of having done that. 

The judge did not see anything wrong with her story and would not allow me to examine the therapy notes whose front page indicated that she had already told the social worker that her father had been convicted. 

A report had been created for Victims compensation, and in it, she had alleged that her father had enjoyed sexual intercourse with her three times a week in the family home or the shed from when she was nine to when she was 14.  She had been awarded some forty thousand dollars in victims’ compensation before the trial, and she had already spent half of it.  She claimed that she had not received any money, but records showed otherwise. 

The jury convicted her father and he remains in prison. 

Anyone who has lived in a house with lots of other people will attest to the difficulties of getting privacy for nookie.  Out of six resident people, their neighbours and school friends, someone always comes home unexpectedly.  No one had ever suspected, let alone come across this recurrent activity. 

This was spectral evidence and the defence team did not allow it to emerge.  The Victims’ compensation report was suppressed. The defence lawyers saw it as a high risk strategy to tell the jury that she had actually accused him of some fifteen hundred rapes.  The magnitude, perhaps the enormity of her complaints stayed concealed through two appeals.   

That which is not memory

The characteristics of memory are not common knowledge.  Mistaken beliefs that it works like a video recorder underpin the statements that some accusers provide. This is known as the ‘Hollywood presentation’, because it is like film script providing detail of action, costume, climate and furniture.

An acrimonious separation between her mother and stepfather was followed by period of estrangement from her mother. The 18 year old girl declared, in the course of an savage family argument, that her stepfather ‘did it’ to her. 

A policeman friend was a was called in and, nine months after that, she gave a 64 paragraph statement, describing eight sexual events spanning a period of some ten years from the ages of four to fourteen. 

She was able to recall the address of each house, the season of the year, the furniture, her clothes and his, the time of day and exactly what he did to her on each occasion. 

As well, she alleged that sexual congress often occurred at night, when her stepfather left her unsuspecting mother’s bed to return before dawn, unnoticed. 

I dare say that no one of us recalls exactly what we were wearing any eight days of our lives nor what any one else wore on a specific day, even three months ago. 

Most of us could not describe our second-most recent sexual congress in the detail in which she described his sequential hand movements. 

This is not memory. 

The American Psychiatric Association calls it ‘confabulation’ and recognises it a side effect of bad therapy or overenthusiastic victims’ services.  It can be a manifestation of any number of other mental phenomena but it is not memory.

This case also involved spectral evidence, in that her step father, her mother and the family’s lodger were all self-employed as couriers and they, her brother, his and her school friends wandered in and out all hours.  No one had ever come across or suspected a sexual relationship between the stepfather and the girl.

The defence lawyer exposed the spectral evidence and his man was acquitted on retrial. In his first  trial, conducted in the minimalist, ‘she said, he denied’ model, the jury had convicted him on several counts but a juror dissenting on one charge was threatened by the others so a mistrial was declared.

The prosecutor was directed to allow the accuser to be examined by another forensic psychiatrist who fortunately shared my view.  I was not allowed to be present nor was I allowed to give evidence as my expert advice was based only on the documents.

The triad of dubious origins, pseudo-memory and spectral evidence tend to co-exist and they correlate well with each other.

How spectral evidence is to be treated provides lawyers with a conflict. It is intuitive to minimise the allegations, limit them, rather than expose the whole fantasised scenario to ridicule.  Both strategies carry legal hazard for you and your client.  On the other hand, you may attract an appeal on the basis of incompetent defence if the strategy of exposure fails.  You may lose your only chance to get an acquittal if you do not take the risk.

I mentioned earlier that the reliability of a report can be deduced from studying its origins.  The case against the legendary Mr Bubbles ended in 1989 when Judge Hyde ruled that the children's evidence was inadmissible because of interference from parents and police. 

This was not the end of it for the teachers who had been falsely accused.  To this day, the Palm Beach Peninsula remains bitterly divided on the issue of their guilt or innocence.  Compensation is running into millions.

Had the accuser of the kindergarten owners been investigated by multi disciplinary team, we would have learnt of the origins of the belief in a paedophile called Mr Bubbles.

I was told that a single mother had her three year old daughter out in a restaurant at nine in the evening.  The child yawned and stretched.  Her mother, influenced by her own substantial psychopathology, interpreted her as making a sexual gesture.  Her loaded question, ‘Tell me, who did it to you? was eventually answered by a exhausted child looking into a fish tank, saying ‘Bubbles.’

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