An expert radiologist says Australian federal police continued to use wrist X-rays to prosecute children as adult people smugglers after he had given unequivocal evidence of the technique’s unreliability, something he now says was “just wrong” and akin to “child abuse”.as adult people smugglers in 2010 amid the highly charged political atmosphere around border protection.
Police instead took the dates of birth they provided and altered the year to make their ages align with the wrist X-ray evidence, placing the new dates on sworn legal documents.The six boys – and dozens of others – were imprisoned in maximum security adult correctional facilities in Western Australia.
The radiologist Dr James Christie began to appear as a defence expert witness in similar people smuggling cases after the six boys were convicted in 2010. Christie gave evidence that the technique had no scientific validity, and was based on a “cascading sequence of unknown factors and incorrect assumptions to attempt to provide a level of precision about estimation of chronological age that does not exist”.Christie was shocked when police continued to use the technique.
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Source: GuardianAus - 🏆 1. / 98 Read more »