In the second episode of Trial By Water, we tease apart the strands of scientific evidence that were so important in the case against Robert Farquharson, who’s serving 33 years for murdering his three children.
Listen now in the player below.
Robert Farquharson’s trial for murder is what legal experts call a “strands of the rope case”. It describes how a prosecutor can weave a whole bunch of disparate threads of evidence together to form a single, coherent story.
In cases like this, no single strand, or thread of the evidence can carry enough weight on its own for a jury to say, “the accused is definitely guilty”. But woven together the rope is strong enough, metaphorically, to hang you.