CRYING IN HIS BEER
The destruction of Oscar's 'expert' witness
HE was accused of misleading the court. Of not being prepared. Of opening his mouth without having the facts at hand.
And by the time his cross-examination was complete he looked like a deer stuck in the headlights.
We are not talking about Hilton Botha, defence advocate Barry Roux’s favourite chew toy. No, the mantle of bumbling witness in the Oscar Pistorius murder trial was this week passed to Roger Dixon, a jack of all trades and, according to prosecutor Gerrie Nel, master of none.
When Dixon took the stand you would have been forgiven for thinking the grey-bearded man was about to offer pearls of wisdom.
What followed instead was annihilation by Nel.
It seemed Dixon had not expected the intense scrutiny he would come under, inside and outside the court.
He claimed in court that he did not own a television or radio, did not read newspapers and had not been following news of the trial — but his Twitter account showed he had been following journalists covering the trial earlier in the year.
Then the bombshell — Dixon posted a message on his Facebook wall on Thursday: “Third day in court today. Let’s see how much of my credibility, integrity and professional reputation is destroyed. It is difficult to get belief in those who will not listen because it is not what they want to hear. After that, beer!”
He later deleted the post, but not before it was captured by the media.
He told The Guardian that he had intended it as a joke.
Dixon gave testimony touching on almost every field of science that has featured in the trial thus far: the difference between the sounds of gunshots and a cricket bat hitting a door; the lighting conditions in Pistorius’s bedroom; Reeva Steenkamp’s wounds and the postmortem results.
However, when his opinion on everything and anything came under cross-examination by a ferocious Nel, Dixon, attached to the Department of Geology at the University of Pretoria, floundered. He admitted that:
He was not an expert in wound ballistics, blood splatter or sound analysis;
He used only his eyes to test the light in the bedroom;
He was not present when the gunshot test recordings were made;
He had not properly studied the state pathologist’s report, and made interpretations of it based on his “layman’s understanding”;
He had determined that fibres on the toilet door matched those of the sock on Pistorius’s prosthesis but had determined this by comparing marks
Third day in court. Let’s see how much of my credibility . . . is destroyed
on the door to photos and had never handled the actual sock;
He had used a cricket bat to conduct his examination of the marks on the door, but never used the actual bat used by Pistorius in conducting his investigation; and
He used a member of the defence team posing on his knees at the bathroom window to stand in for Pistorius as he would appear on his stumps, despite the fact that the athlete standing without his legs on would be approximately 20cm taller than the man in the photo shown to the court.
Alarmingly for the defence, Dixon also contradicted the athlete’s testimony that the magazine rack in the toilet had not been in the position it was shown in police photos of the scene, saying that the position shown in the photos was where it would have been at the time of the shooting.
This was the first case that Dixon has been asked to assist with since leaving the police, where he worked as a forensic analyst for 18 years.
Would he ever want to go up against someone like Nel again? Well, at least there is always beer. FOOT AND MOUTH: Defence expert witness Roger Dixon holds a prosthesis in court this week