Saturday, September 08, 2018

Is the Witness a "Liar for Hire" or an Unbiased Voice?


The Crown Prosecution Service is now facing calls to review the suitability of Professor Stephen Harris as an expert witness.

The call for review comes from Dr. Ted Friend, a recently retired professor at Texas A&M University who reviewed what Professor Harris had summarized of his work on the welfare of circus animals and found it both biased and terribly misrepresented. Dr. Friend says Harris’s work contains “blatant inaccuracies”.

I am concerned that very few people have actually read my scientific publications and discovered that Harris’s spin is 180 degrees from what we found.

Dr Friend says that

In 40 years as a researcher, I have never seen a reviewer deliberately omit peer-reviewed papers on [on the basis that they must have three or more authors]. Professor Harris then cherry-picked sections of my remaining papers that did have three or more authors.

Dr Friend complained to Bristol University where Harris worked and was told that the work had been "independently reviewed" and the university found no need for further investigation. Two months later, however, Professor Harris retired quite suddenly.

Professor Stephen Harris has pocketed hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding from animal rights groups including the League Against Cruel Sports and the RSPCA, but he denies his work is biased. That said, his summary analysis of other's work has been called into question before. In 2000, for example Terry Kreeger, a veterinarian from Wyoming, wrote to the Government inquiry into foxhunting (the Burns Report) to complain that his research had been seriously misrepresented.

In 2015, a Lamerton Hunt trial collapsed when it emerged that Professor Harris had failed to mention his longtime friendship with the head of investigations at the League Against Cruel Sports, which was bringing the private prosecution. Professor Harris said he was told by the charity that he did not need to mention it, and should not mention it to the court. The League Against Cruel Sports has since misrepresented their own work as being produced by Bristol University

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