For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia's forensic pathology services. In cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath, and whether they had died naturally - or not. But Manock did not have the necessary training for such a specialist role, and made serious errors in several major cases. The full extent of his wrongdoing, and the exact number of cases impacted by it, remain a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired. In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock's most controversial cases.
A WITNESS OF FACT describes how an entire legal system has failed, how unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet - and how forensic evidence that is admitted in courts of law is dubious more often than we would like to think.