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Professor Gordon Hawkins plays the role of McLeod Lindsay as he walks through the night he came home from his work at the pub and found his wife brutally bashed.
Curator’s notes
The jury found McLeod Lindsey guilty after only two hours of deliberation. The circumstantial case built up by the prosecution was complicated and often at odds with the defence case. There was never any motivation suggested as to why McLeod Lindsey might have wanted to try to murder his wife, and at the trial his wife insisted that the voice of her attacker was Australian and not Scottish like the voice of her husband. The jury still found him guilty, apparently on the scientific evidence of the direction of the bloodstains found on his jacket, for which the program mounts a plausible explanation.
Criminologist Professor Gordon Hawkins points up the anomalies in the prosecution case and argues that it would be difficult to say that the verdict of guilty was proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The program uses dramatic recreations of both the prosecution’s version of events and that of the defence team. There are also explanations of information that came to light only during the judicial enquiry that, in the end, didn’t overturn the original jury decision. Long after McLeod Lindsey was released after serving his sentence, another enquiry did quash his conviction. A terrible story of how easily justice can go off the rails and how difficult it is to restore things after the jury has pronounced its verdict.
