Trial by Trickery
The infamous Blink Photo
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A normal photo of Scott Watson, taken at Picton Police Station, 8 January 1998. No-one identified him as the mystery man from this image |
The ‘blink photo’ chosen by the Police for identification purposes when other photos failed. |
On the right is the false image the police used to trick the principal
eyewitnesses into identifying Scott Watson as the killer. Now aware of
the trick and of Watson's true appearance, all these eyewitnesses have
retracted their"identifications".
For years I’ve sat in front of film editing benches while editors cut
interviews into useful shape. Time and again I’ve watched the editors
inch film backwards and forwards looking for a place to perform a perfect
cut, and time and again I’ve watched the movement of the interviewees'
eyes, open for a few seconds – or for a few hundred frames - and then
for a frame half-closed, then closed, then half-closed again and then
again open. I’ve seen literally thousands of blinks in slow motion. The
photo of Watson was identical to the half closed stage in those hundreds
of interviews. He was caught halfway through a blink. In fact Watson had
'hooded'-style eyes for two twenty-fifths of a second every few seconds,
as do we all. When I discovered that the mystery man the police had sought
was commonly described as having 'hooded eyes' the reason why the police
chose the blink photo to insert into their identification montage became
both clear and, in my mind, monstrous.
I later read an astonishing decision by the trial judge in which he had
pronounced that it was 'a pose that (Watson) sometimes, from time
to time, adopts'. With this extraordinarily ignorant, or prejudiced,
pronouncement, he approved the police use of a photograph of a man blinking
to identify him as a 'hooded-eyes' killer.
KH
Chris Watson, Scott’s Father“The facts presented here illustrate not only the unfairness of my son’s trial but the demonisation process which occurred in the months leading up to it. Will the justice system take note of this book and act?
...‘J’accuse!”