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

In any adversarial trial where there is a dispute over the truth of a case, a jury is presented with an algebraic equation of information, and to get the right decision and avoid a miscarriage of justice, it is necessary to resolve that equation correctly and thoroughly.

This being so, then why are twelve heads needed to do it, and how can they resolve the equation correctly if they don't know that this is an equation or how to do it? Such equations may take days or weeks to resolve, yet the jury has time pressure on them to resolve cases within hours.

There are many reasons why our juries are likely to go for the wrong resolution in criminal trials, because a complete resolution of the equation is necessary for the whole truth to convince, and the pretentious view of a case is often the easiest to convey and to understand, so that it is the most persuasive and believable without this mathematical resolution.

Another inherent fault in the jury system is that its resolution of a case will tend to drift away from the intelligence of the individual to the common denominator of the social group, and this absolves the individual in the group from responsibility in a wrong decision. The jury system has a tendency towards mob justice where a thoroughly responsible intelligence of the facts is required.

In the adversarial trial system the odds are stacked against a correct decision because the jury system, which is designed to enable the public to evaluate issues that need public opinion, is not suitable. In criminal trials a system is required that uses an official equation resolver, someone who has the time and ability to resolve an equation correctly and record his resolution for others to examine and check.

An algebraic equation is a balance of natural ratios that enables us to determine the values of unknown quantities within a mathematical whole, and the logic and behaviour of truth and untruth in court equations behaves in the same way as the values of numbers in mathematical equations.

This correspondence with algebra is apparent in the behaviour of liars and hypocrites everywhere, who reverse the values of truth in such disputes to achieve self-serving ends, thereby creating a mathematical balance problem which accords with the characteristics of a numerical equation. In any court equation, one side is pretentious, which is often the most persuasive and easily conveyed interpretation of the evidence, and the other is the truthful case, which is usually hard to fix without doing the algebra, hence the other case.

In criminal trial situations one side is in the right and the other is in the wrong. The wrong may be concealed by a dishonesty or by a conveyed ignorance, which has a traceable motivation behind it. The equation is a balance between innocence and some form of guilt, between the malicious and the benign.

In an adversarial court examination, an innocent person usually finds it difficult to relate to a prosecution case against him, and he is recognizable for a willingness to make admissions and confirm points that may appear to be incriminatory to the prosecution case, without his having to do so and without his 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 or dishonest 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, the equation cannot possibly be complted erroneously if all the evidence and elements are accounted for. The resolution of these equations is a matter of simple logic, and a look at some famous cases will hopefully help to illustrate how the algebra works.

The Louise Woodward Case

In the Louise Woodward case, a young British girl aged 17 was working as a nanny in the United States when a baby in her care died of a head injury. She was charged with first-degree murder, which is effectively a charge of intent to murder. The prosecution case was that the injury had occurred at the time of death, but the medical evidence indicated that it could have occurred days before.

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

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

However, if we consider the parents' side of the equation, a possible source of the aggression and presumptuousness behind the first-degree murder charge seems evident. The source of the 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 going to find 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, and the subject of this neurosis was the baby�s welfare, and the object of the aggression was Louise Woodward, the object of the trial, 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 correspondence in the aggression and also the presumptuousness behind the charge. 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.

If we were to suppose that the father had had the relevant accident with the baby himself, and that he was using the court and the police to convince himself that he was not responsible for the baby's death, then we would get a resolution that corresponds with the aggression and presumptuousness of the charge. In fact there is an intimation that such an accident may have occurred, and it is in the supposed hypocrisy itself; in fact 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 missing motive factor into the equation.

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, 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 in the equation was that of 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 this prosecution case.

The Louise Woodward case is not perhaps a good equation to begin with as it involves speculation about an event that was not examined at the trial, but it will help to show what is required in the logical resolution of these equations. At least there is sufficient resolution to dismiss the charge of first or second-degree murder against Louise Woodward.

The Derek Bentley Case

An interesting equation is the Derek Bentley case, which resolves logically into a completely different explanation for what happened on that infamous roof than was presented by the police at the trial. In this case, Derek Bentley and his friend Craig had been seen at night on a warehouse roof 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 situation PC Miles was shot dead. The police couldn�t hang Craig because he was only aged fifteen, so they charged Derek Bentley with murder, even though he had handed himself into police custody as soon as they arrived and was co-operating with them. To justify the charge the police used the testimony that Bentley had called out "Let him have it, Chris" to implicate him in the death.

Leaving aside the significant issue that he was in their custody at the time of the incident, 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 being whether Craig's gun was actually the one that killed PC Miles.

In the first issue, there are at least nine points that undermine 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 Bentley's and Craig's denial, which was that the police were saying that he had said it.

The second issue consists of a most perfect set of circumstances for assisting the equation resolver, and this concerns the matter of whether it was actually Craig's gun that shot PC Miles. Only a brief moment would have elapsed between the emergence of PC Miles from the stairs on to the roof and his swirling round for cover behind the stair-head, and it was during this moment that he received the fatal bullet. 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, and Craig was 40 feet from the stair-head, and he would have had difficulty in seeing PC Miles because this incident occurred 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 would 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 access to. So not only was the gun wildly inaccurate, but its power was softened as well.

All of which mathematically rules out the possibility that Craig's gun had been responsible for the fatal bullet, and to double-check this, we have to look at the other side of the equation, which would instead 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, which implies accuracy at relatively close range in the case of a revolver. And in the darkness, 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 by the police, and it was this part of him that was shot. So, on this side of the equation, the logic has PC Miles startling an armed officer when he swirled round for cover behind the stair-head, and the officer firing at the apparition that had alarmed him.

Mathematically one would have to conclude that Craig did not shoot PC Miles, and this 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. This resolution also explains why the police wanted to hang Bentley. He wasn't being blamed for the shooting of PC Miles but for the original burglary incident that had given rise to this accident.

The hypocrisy factor and motive in this equation must be on the police side, and the murder in this case was not the subject of the trial but the object of it. Taking into account the trauma and humiliation arising from the accident, police anger would be understandable, but an inadequate justice system cost Bentley his life unjustly.

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 was designed to look extremely intimidating. Lord Goddard was not able to realize that no one would actually use this spike on anyone, certainly not Bentley himself, and that the point of its design was to ward off 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 Timothy Evans Case

In the Timothy Evans case, his wife was strangled by their landlord, John Reginald Christie, who told Evans that her death was due to an abortion accident. Since Evans felt implicated in this abortion arrangement, and fearing that he would get into trouble with the police himself, he agreed to Christie's suggestion that he give his baby Geraldine over to Christie for some friends of Christie's to look after, and with Christie's encouragement Evans went back to Wales. 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, and he was escorted back to London, where he was shown that his wife and baby had both been strangled. In his bewilderment and shock, Evans confessed responsibility to the deaths himself, but as he began to realize what had happened, he accused Christie of the murders. However, the jury didn't believe him, and he was hanged.

It was discovered three years later that Christie was a serial strangler, for which he was hanged, so that in accusing Christie, Evans had evidently known that Christie was a killer without being aware of the two bodies already in the garden, and he could only have got this information from the murders of his wife and baby daughter.

In the Timothy Evans case, there was a solid equation for determining his innocence at his trial, with two aspects that we can double-check by, these being the matter of motive, especially in the matter of the murder of his baby daughter, and the issue of Evans's reputation as a social fibber. It was the latter that caused the jury to doubt his word and got him hanged.

In the matter of motive, 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 on his side of the equation is negative. If he had been slandering Christie to avoid conviction while being guilty himself, he would have known how to incriminate Christie with a motive for the murder of his baby Geraldine. In those days sex murderers were not much known of, and being the father of the baby, Evans would have been emotionally unable to conceive the idea that anyone could murder his baby just to get rid of it.

On Christie's side of the equation, the motive factor comes up positive, but it is somewhat convoluted and looks psychiatric. Christie was asked about his activities at the time of the murders, and in his defence he created a self-portrait of infirmity, claiming that he had had enteritis at the time and couldn't take solid food, only milk; and that he had had fibrositis (a back problem, no doubt caused by stress and by dragging the bodies about), and that he had been so feeble that if he had 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, he made an involuntary admission which had no apparent relevance to the questioning, when he said elsewhere in the trial that his wife had accidentally spilled his milk on his bed. If we add all this information up, what we get is a collective portrait of a man in the form of a baby, while the subject of the questioning was the exact opposite, namely the body of a baby which had been dressed in the form of a man, this because the killer had tied Evans's neck tie round the baby's neck to incriminate Evans. And what is the 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 hypocrisy, his guilt and his motive, which was psychopathic.

The other issue is the matter of Evans's social fibbing and his false confessions. It was put to Evans by the prosecution that the reason he had confessed to the murders was that it had brought him relief to tell the truth, but since when does telling the truth bring relief to a fantasist and social liar? Surely the whole point of social lying is that it had brought relief in situations that he couldn't otherwise deal with?

On Christie's side of the equation, there is plenty of evidence for the hypocritical aspect of his personality. For instance, there was his policeman's uniform and responsibility, which he had acquired while having a criminal record, which means that he would have lied to the authorities to get these. In criminal law he would have worn these as a hypocrite and a fraud. And there are also his earlier frauds serving as a precedent for criminal lying, and also an earlier conviction for an attack on a train passenger, which tendency to violence corresponds with guilt in these murders.

Concerning Evans's confessions, the logical resolution is that Evans had lied his way to the truth as he knew it at that time, and that the difference between his confessions 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, for he didn't know about the death of his baby Geraldine 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 there was his fear of Christie's word and the pretentious respectability of his policeman�s uniform, and in the second it had taken him several days to work out the unbelievable, in which 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 effectively done previously with his wife.

The effective liar in this equation was John Reginald Christie, who was a manipulative and criminal liar, and whose behaviour created all the facts in this equation, including Evans's odd behaviour in entrusting his baby to Christie. 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 Jeremy Bamber case

This must be the most shameful miscarriage of justice in British history. While courts of justice are meant to be heard according to the Oath of Truth, part two of which is "the whole truth", and while the public has access to lots of information which undermines Bamber's conviction, his appeals are still being rejected by our courts. One of the strange things about the case is that according to the evidence, Bamber only arrived at the crime scene while the police were already there, their having been alerted to the situation by Bamber himself after he had received a telephone call from his adoptive father a few moments before he was killed. According to this telephone call Bamber's adopted sister had gone on the rampage at the house with a rifle. Bamber, who lived nearly four miles away, had alerted the police and then rushed over himself. One either has to imagine that he had arranged all this for an alibi, as his prosecutors did, or else accept the evidence of the crime scene, as the police originally did. They found the farm locked up within and with no sign of forced entry.

While Bamber was outside the farmhouse with the police, they saw a figure moving about in the main bedroom, which could only have been the sister before she shot herself. The police were forced to prosecute Bamber under pressure from the relatives. Being the adopted son of the dead father, Bamber did not belong to their family and there was a substantial inheritance involved.

The case against Jeremy Bamber was based on two points, the first being a word against word situation concerning the testimony of his ex-girlfriend, and the other is the matter of a silencer that was found in a gun box under the stairs by the dead father's relatives, which allegedly had a tiny spot of the adoptive sister's blood inside it. The prosecution case was that this undermined the defence case that she had committed the shootings.

Concerning the ex-girlfriend's testimony, this was that Bamber had told her that he was going to murder his family before the incident occurred, and Bamber has always denied saying this. So someone in this equation is lying. If it is possible to work out the truth in such a word against word situation, it is necessary to examine the logic on each side of the case.

The prosecution side of the story works out like this: Bamber decides to murder his family for the inheritance, and he tells his girlfriend that he is going to do this, thus enabling her to report it afterwards. Then he shoots his entire family. Then he falls out with his girlfriend, thus freeing her to come forward with her testimony, and this at a time when the relatives were pressing for a prosecution against him. This side of the equation has the ex-girlfriend's guilt in it (complicity with murder, due to her delay in giving this information) and it has 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. This story requires us to believe that Bamber would dump his girlfriend and confidant while the family and police were suspicious of him and while he would need to keep her sweet and on his side because of such testimony.

The defence side of the story works out like this: Bamber's family is wiped out in the shooting, and (for reasons that should become apparent shortly) he decides that in the light of this situation his girlfriend isn't suitable any more, so he dumps her. 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. This side of the equation suggests that her interest in Bamber was in his inheritance, which would explain 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. The evidence of Bamber's behaviour in their relationship indicates that he couldn�t have expected that testimony.

It is reported that the ex-girlfriend had tried to smother him with a pillow before going to the police with her story, so that her malice in trying to smother him is evidently behind her going to the police.

The ex-girlfriend's testimony is thoroughly discredited, and it is useless as evidence. It logically resolves as a malicious untruth and doesn't agree with the evidence.

The other key point of the prosecution case was the matter of the silencer, which was found by a member of the father's family in the gun box under the stairs after the crime scene had been cleared up. This silencer allegedly had a tiny spot of the adoptive sister's blood in it. The prosecution's case was that the sister could not have shot herself upstairs, where her body was found, then put the silencer away in the gun box downstairs, and then returned upstairs to die. The rifle would have been too long for her to shoot herself with the silencer attached, so if she had used it she would have needed to remove it before she shot herself.

The silencer could have been put in the gun box by her after shooting the father in the kitchen and before going upstairs where her body was found, and the spot of blood is contested evidence. The silencer may have been placed in the gun box by the crime scene cleaners, since it would have little material value to the investigation at the time as the crime scene was self-explanatory. It was only after the finding of the silencer in the gun box that any doubts were raised about the crime scene.

The only body that did not look dishevelled and blood-spattered was that of the adoptive sister, Sheila Caffael, who was apparently responsible for the carnage. Her body was notably clean and reposed, and she looked to the police as though she were sleeping like an angel. She also had a Bible beside her. This is not consistent with her being part of the carnage committed by another party. This evidence is only consistent with her shooting herself afterwards. The two boys were shot in the back of the head, execution style, several times, an absurd overkill that does not agree with the prosecution premise either. The finding of the silencer has meant that the crime scene evidence has not counted.

Whenever Bamber has protested his innocence in the public media since, the adoptive father's family has promptly wheeled out an old aunt to contest his appeals, without showing any concern about the possibility of his being in jail for a crime that he didn't commit. Like our justice system itself, they are self-righteously living off the proceeds of what they themselves wish to see as his crime.

The hypocrisy factor in this equation is apparent in the ex-girlfriend at the time of the trial and in the relatives at the trial and since, with Bamber's inheritance as the motive for it, which hypocrisy has passed on through Britain's justice system. There has been no evidence of hypocrisy on the part of Bamber anywhere, and he is evidently the innocent factor in it. Anyway, his conviction is utterly unjustified.

The Scales of Justice

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, applying natural logic to the facts. 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.

The jury system was created with a unanimous verdict in mind, but in 1967 the 10-2 majority verdict was allowed, presumably to speed up cases in which the jury had difficulty, and this has degraded the integrity of our jury system. The problem with the majority verdict is that it allows the "mob" (or the lowest common denominator) of the jury to get past the intelligent conscience in it, when previously, the requirement of a unanimous verdict ensured that the "mob" of the group would eventually give out to the intelligent conscience in it.

For the Lee Harvey Oswald case click here.

For the Major Ingram case click here.

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