In the third episode of test for water we look at the human elements of the case against Robert Farquharson: what people saw and heard and what they told the jury.
The prosecution of Farquharson for the murder of his three children, by driving his car into a dam in 2005, had six main threads, each reinforcing the other.
Listen now in the player below.
When DNA evidence became available in the 1990s and exposed a series of wrongful convictions, it had an unexpected consequence. In such cases of wrongful conviction, it was often found that witnesses were willing to swear in court to things they could not have seen.
And what the researchers discovered was that the memory evidence was indeed problematic.
This episode analyzes the memory evidence provided by two of the prosecution's star witnesses: Greg King, a friend of Farquharson's who told the police that Farquharson had outlined the plot to kill his children just months earlier; i Dawn Waitewho came forward four years after the incident to claim that he had seen Farquharson driving erratically on the night of the accident, and saw him go off the road towards the dam.
