The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part three of three

Last month’s blog post was about how my personal experiences have influenced my handling of sources in my research, including photographs. Though photographs of crime scenes are the main source around which my research pivots, I am also interested in the meanings of photographs as material and emotive objects in the files. This blog post in three parts uses four different case studies to explore some of the multiple meanings of photographs in the case files.

In part one of this post I described how the crime scene photographs in cases of domestic murder that I use in my research served as a surrogate for the space of the crime in the space of the courtroom. I used the example of the 1957 trial of Brian for the murder of his wife Moira to illustrate how the photographs were used at the Old Bailey to support the prosecution’s narrative of what happened on the day Moira died. Part two of this post used the 1930s cases of Eric’s murder of Juliette, and George’s murder of Tom the boarding house keeper, to illustrate another meaning of photographs to police and court: as signifiers of intimate relationships, with important consequences for witnesses, defendants and victims in cases of domestic murder.

Part three of this post explores a further meaning of photographs: as provoking emotional responses, as alleged motivators for murder.

Blackmail is a slippery issue in cases of murder. If person A attempts to blackmail person B by threatening to reveal some secret about them to another party, to the public, or to the authorities, and person B kills person A (either on purpose or accidentally), person B is unlikely to reveal to the police all of the information about the events that led to the death. You can say what you like about the dead. In many of the cases of murder I've looked at in my research I've wondered if there is some hidden piece of information that the defendant was looking to protect by killing. The likelihood is, we’ll never know. In one case, however, blackmail was given as the reason for being provoked into killing. And I am equally suspicious of the narrative given by that defendant, particularly as there was no evidence of the blackmail having taken place. The secret the defendant didn't want to get out, he said, was a photograph. But the photograph was never found.

This case tells us, not what really happened, in this as in many other cases we can never know what the perspective of the victim might have been because they are deceased. But what we can know is what the defendant believed was a credible narrative of events, a powerful enough story, a good enough reason to provoke him to kill. If his story was believed he could get away with a charge of manslaughter rather than murder, and manslaughter could in some circumstances mean a suspended sentence: he might even walk free.

In January 1960, Cleveland, a 32-year-old Jamaican man working in the East End as a decorator, was asked to give a statement to police when his girlfriend, 35-year-old beauty and alleged ‘Dope Queen’, Frances, was found dead at their partially burned flat in Brick Lane. In the first statement he gave to police, Cleveland described how he had met Frances in 1958 when she was living in rooms in Stepney. They had only known each other a few weeks when they decided to live together, and Frances knew of a place:

‘She told me that she knew where some rooms were going at Brick Lane [Stepney], E.1. and the landlord wanted £15 key money and £3 rent in advance. At that time I did not have such money. She said that she could borrow it from her place of work if I would pay it back. I agreed and she got the money. I paid her back in two sums of £8 and £7. She said that other three pounds was out of her wages. We agreed to put our money together and be the joint owners [sic: tenants]. I earned £12 per week and I gave her £10 a week for rent, food and towards buying furniture.’

Though Frances was working full-time she still needed Cleveland’s income to help her set up a new home and afford the rent. Their Brick Lane flat had comfortable furnishings: a settee, lamps, photos and ornaments on the mantelpiece, and, in December 1959, a decorated Christmas tree. When Cleveland had gone to prison for just over a year, Frances needed to pawn some of his suits to make ends meet.

Cleveland’s first statement continues, he was away from the flat when Frances died in it, he said, he didn’t know anything about it. After the statement had been read back to him and signed, an officer handed him a copy of that day’s Daily Mirror. A copy of the front page also exists in the file as an exhibit of evidence. The main headline read ‘IT WAS MURDER… QUEEN OF DOPE DIES IN FIRE’ and included a photo of the rescue of Frances’ upstairs neighbours from the building, as well as a snapshot of her when she was alive.

Daily Mirror, 12^th January 1960, p. 1, via ukpressonline

Cleveland read the page carefully a couple of times and then said he wanted to make another statement.

The second statement gives a dramatic and emotional account of a narrative that Cleveland hoped would make police officers sympathetic. It was ‘shocking’ and ‘terrible’, he said, what this woman had tried to do to him.

‘[One day] …she and I were sitting up in the flat opposite each other. All of a sudden she say to me ‘You can never leave me because all the men have lived with her before have left her but you will not leave me because I have something holding on me that would make me stay with her.’ She took out a small photograph… This photograph showed me stripped naked lying on the bed and she stripped naked too with her private part near my mouth with a dirty diaper [sanitary towel] in my mouth and I had all sh*t on my face and she was leaning sideways with her private part on my face…’

It seems that police doubted the story. They looked for syringes in the partially fire-damaged flat to corroborate Cleveland’s story that Frances had ‘doped’ him before she took the photograph. The post-mortem report was compared with Cleveland's description of how he had lost his temper over the threat of the photograph, knocking Frances to the floor where she lost consciousness before he set a fire to cover up what he had done. Pencil notes in the margins of the statement suggest that the Metropolitan Police and/or the Director of Public Prosecutions believed that it was possible that the photograph had existed, and that Frances might've taken it while Cleveland was asleep. But they never found any trace of the photograph.

'? Provocation' : pencil notes written in the margins of Cleveland's statement.

Cleveland hoped that police would believe that an image like the one he described, and the threat of its use against him, was sufficient provocation as to reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter. The fact that he only described the photo after he found out that police suspected murder, shows that he realised how much trouble he could be in. Provocation had very recently been codified in law and featured in many high-profile murder cases and newspaper reports on them. With this in mind, Cleveland's story represents what he thought was a believable act by a woman desperate to make a man stay living with her. She was blackmailing him, using the photograph, to make him stay. And it wasn't just the existence of the photo and copies of it that would keep Cleveland living with Frances, he claimed she thought, but also the threat of what she would do with it.

‘She said she would show it to my sister who is a good woman and my friends who would laugh at me and it would hurt my sister terribly. It so shocked me I went to grab it from her but she put it in her mouth and chewed it and swallowed it. But she said she had plenty more like that to show… my sister and friends… I hunted the flat and pulled it to pieces but I could never find those other dirty pictures of me. I begged and begged of her to give them to me but she only laughed at me.’

He describes his desperation, real, imagined, or totally made-up, to get the pictures from her. And if she wouldn't give them up, Cleveland pleaded with Frances to let him get away, to go where nobody knew him to escape the shame.

‘I begged of her to let me go out of the country or to Glasgow or somewhere I was not known but she laughed and said I would not get rid of her so easy. And she said she would show the bad photographs to my sister. I begged of her not to do this thing for my sister’s sake, but she only laughed.’

‘I can always make you come back [home] any time I want to’ Cleveland said Frances told him. He painted an image of himself as fearful of this clever ‘terrible’ scheming woman who was blackmailing him. Police were less than sympathetic, especially when he described the struggle that took place when he tried to get the photos from her. Whether police agreed that the shame threatened by this photograph was serious enough to understand Frances’ murder as provocation, and therefore manslaughter, is unclear, although he was indicted for the more serious crime of murder, which strongly suggests that police believed they had enough evidence that he was not reasonably provoked. For his part Cleveland seemed more worried about the photograph being found and seen by his sister than the punishment that might be in store for him for killing Frances.

‘I pray God nothing will be done to bring shame to my sister about the photographs. I pray God you will find them and destroy them to save my family shame. That is the whole truth. Everything I have told you before [prior to arrest] was true except that I did not tell you what happened at the flat last night between me and Francis [sic] when Francis died… I have read this statement and is Gods trouth. [pencil note points to this last sentence: ‘In own hand writing’] (Sgd.)’ 

The methods I've used to interpret the file documents are significant here. I consider the impact of evidence on the indictment, the influence of the recent Homicide Act (1957) on gathering documentary evidence and conducting police interviews, the recent codification in law of provocation and how newspaper reporting on cases where provocation had reduced sentences might've meant that such notions seeped into public understanding, I also take into account the pencil notes annotating the documents, and all this contributes to a deeper understanding of each type of document and its role and significance in the courtroom. It particularly helps to explain the importance of narratives like the one given by Cleveland to explain why he had ended up killing his partner.

We have to ask, where did Frances get the idea to blackmail Cleveland with a photograph like this? OR, where did Cleveland get the idea to tell police this story that Frances had blackmailed him with a photograph like this? Whichever is the right question to ask, the result is the same: Cleveland thought that this was a believable story – that a reasonable man could be moved enough by a photograph to snap and kill. 

The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part two of three

Last month’s blog post was about how my personal experiences have influenced my handling of sources in my research, including photographs. Though photographs of crime scenes are the main source around which my research pivots, I am also interested in the meanings of photographs as material and emotive objects in the files. This blog post in three parts uses four different case studies to explore some of the multiple meanings of photographs in the case files.

In part one of this post I described how the crime scene photographs in cases of domestic murder that I use in my research served as a surrogate for the space of the crime in the space of the courtroom. I used the example of the 1957 trial of Brian for the murder of his wife Moira to illustrate how the photographs were used at the Old Bailey to support the prosecution’s narrative of what happened on the day Moira died. I see this approach to what the science of photography was used to do as contributing to recent work in Photographic History that explores beyond photos as another historical source. Recent articles by Beatriz Pichel and Elizabeth Edwards, for examples, have examined what photographs were intended to do when they were made as part of ‘scientific’ endeavours, and what was done with them (B. Pichel, ‘From facial expressions to bodily gestures: Passions, photography and movement in French 19^th-century sciences’ History of the Human Sciences, 29:1 [2016], 27-48. DOI: 10.1177/0952695115618592 ; E. Edwards, ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology, 25.2 [2014], 171–88. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2014.882834). They have followed work that explores what photographs do as emotional and emotive objects with a variety of meanings, some of which was commented on in the last paper I attended at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia in April (see Tweets about it Storified here). Annebella Pollen’s recent book Mass Photography (I.B. Tauris, 2015) really beautifully and helpfully summarises much of the scholarship on what photographs do, especially in the Introduction, I highly recommend it. 

Drawing on this work, part two of this post on the meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials uses two cases from the 1930s to explore how photographs were interpreted by police and judicial system as signifiers of intimate relationships. This meaning could have important consequences for witnesses, defendants and victims in cases of domestic murder.

Photographs as signifiers of intimate relationships: Eric and Juliette, and Margaret who ‘wore no ring’

At about 11am on Thursday the 5^th of April 1934, PC Ron Rushmore was on duty in Great Portland Street, Soho, when he was approached by a man whose hands were covered in blood. Eric, a 29-year-old stoker in the Navy, told the officer “I have killed a woman” and led him to a flat in a neighbouring street. He showed PC Rushmore the body of his lover, Juliette, on the floor of her bedroom. Rushmore telephoned his Divisional Detective Inspector to come to the flat straight away, and when DDI William Collins arrived he found Eric in the sitting room and arrested him. Eric told the police that Juliette was married to a civil servant who lived in the suburbs, but they had been separated for three years and Juliette went by her maiden name. After Eric had been taken to the police station, Detective Constable Percy Law of Scotland Yard was called to the flat to take photographs of the crime scene.

The photographer Percy Law’s name features in many of the mid-century murder case files I have read in my research. I would really like to learn more about him and his career, especially the training or instruction he may have undertaken to qualify him to take so many photos of domestic murder scenes. Please get in touch via Twitter if you have any information that might help me.

In cases where he took photographs Percy was asked to state at the police court hearing that he had taken them and when. These statements are really useful because, though they do not record the questions deponents were asked, (the responses written in prose rather than in the form of question and answer,) they draw attention to the details present in, or missing from, the photographs that would be most relevant in the prosecution’s and defence’s narratives of events and explanations for the crime.

The man in Naval uniform was Eric. This photograph was important in the case because Juliette’s owning a framed portrait of Eric, and specifically keeping it on display in her bedroom, was understood to mean that she was in an intimate relationship with him.

Detail from one of Percy Law’s photographs of the crime scene.

As Divisional Detective Inspector William Collins said “I found a photograph of him [Eric] in the bedroom. This was the only photograph of a man in the flat.”

The married Juliette did not have a photograph of her husband in her bedroom, but one of Eric, which, to police, showed that she was having a sexual relationship with him.

In this, as in other cases I have seen, an apparently single, separated or divorced woman with a photograph of a man in her bedroom could have all sorts of implications for her reputation. The defence counsel could argue that the defendant had been motivated by sexual jealousy, which, if argued successfully, could reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter or add a recommendation for mercy. If she was the deceased victim she would not be able to challenge such an interpretation. If she was a witness she might be able to attempt to do so, but even the suggestion that she had pre-marital or extra-marital sexual relationships could be enough to have her disbelieved, whatever her testimony.

A good illustration of this is Margaret, a witness at the trial of her former fiance for the murder of her employer. Margaret was arguably as much on trial for her alleged sexual relationships as George, the defendant, for the murder. Two significant pieces of evidence pointed to Margaret as sexually active and therefore as an unreliable witness, one was a novelette with notes in the margins between Margaret and a man, the other was a photograph of Margaret and her employer.

Margaret was 21 when she moved to London from Scotland in 1933. One day, walking in the West End with her roommate, Margaret met George, a Coppersmith from Cyprus, 9 years her senior. Within a few weeks George gave Margaret a wedding ring, told his landlady that he had married, and moved Margaret into his room at his lodgings. George opened a Post Office savings account and started putting away a little of his wages each week toward their real wedding, which the couple thought might take them two years to be able to afford. George later told the court that he ‘kept’ Margaret, giving her most of his wages to feed them both so she didn’t have to work as a waitress anymore. Margaret’s version of events was different. They argued about money, she said, and she tried to leave him, but ‘he threatened to do all sorts of things, and he cost me my job [in a tearoom] and [so] I had to go back to him.’

Tom and his family were also experiencing financial difficulties in the early 1930s. His correspondence school business failed and his wife went to work in a hotel where she ‘lived in’. So Tom sub-let a building in Bloomsbury near the building site of Senate House at the University of London, to rent out rooms and live there himself. He advertised for a housekeeper to help him, and Margaret responded to the ad.

George was unhappy about the job, especially when Margaret announced that she would be going to live at the house. She’d been offered more money by Tom to be the live-in Housekeeper and Manager, and there was a room becoming available that George could rent. They could live in the same house and carry on their relationship in secret. But Margaret wasn’t wearing the wedding ring. She didn’t want Tom to know that she was having a relationship with George, they would have to be discreet. When they stopped sleeping together, George became angry, suspicious and jealous. He accused Tom of sleeping with Margaret in her room in the basement. Margaret denied the accusations, Tom was like a father to her, she said, ‘nothing improper ever took place’ between them. However, George felt his suspicions were confirmed when Tom took Margaret (in her deposition)

‘down to Brighton for the day… we had our photograph taken together while we were there. I wrote on the back of one of the photos ‘with fondest love, Margaret’ and gave it to him. I knew he was a married man and did this for fun. We both treated it as a joke and laughed about it.’

The court did not see the photograph as a joke however. Despite the photo being nothing to do with the actual murder (in fact, George didn’t refer to it in his statement or testimony, so it’s not clear whether he ever saw it before the trial), it was submitted as Exhibit 8 by the defence counsel:

Exhibit 8

Whether the photograph was a joke between a woman and her employer or a picture of a courting couple, it was considered evidence of Margaret’s sexual misconduct and therefore of her unreliability as a witness. During the trial Justice Goddard became impatient with Mr Paterson for the defence when he was questioning Margaret about the photograph and her relationship with Tom. Paterson replied 

'I am only dealing with the credibility of this witness with regard to what happened on the night and I want to see if she is telling us the truth in every respect. I want to find out how far her evidence can be trusted according to the answers which she gives to my questions. I am very sorry that I have had to do it in this way, but I see no other way of doing it...'

Later Goddard reminded him:

'we are not trying Margaret, we are trying the prisoner for murder, and you must please use your discretion as Counsel and obey the ruling which the Court has given and call witnesses whose evidence is directed to something which is material and not to matters which are not material to the issues which we are trying. Cross-examination is one thing, but calling evidence in chief is quite another.'

Margaret was probed about ‘Going to Brighton’ which was implied to mean having an affair. That this meaning was widely understood is clear from George’s response to Margaret going there with Tom, and supported by Claire Langhamer’s article on 'Adultery in Post-war England' (History Workshop Journal, 62:1 [2006], 86-115. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbl004), in which she argues that going to Brighton was one way to procure a divorce, given that it meant sex.

The other damning article of evidence against Margaret was the handwritten notes in the novelette found in her room, particularly ‘I will show you my bedroom’. The notes were not between Margaret and George, however, but between her and another ‘foreigner’ who lived in the lodging house where George had installed Margaret. Ironically, the little book was called She Wore No Ring and was about a young woman duped into marrying a criminal. She then falls in love with her boss who didn’t know she was married because ‘she wore no ring’.

Exhibit 12

"I will show you my bedroom" "I am much obliged"

The photograph and little book were evidence enough for the jury to add a strong recommendation for mercy to the guilty verdict they returned, citing the provocation of Tom’s remarks. ‘The Cypriot Murderer’ as press called him, was sentenced to death but commuted to life imprisonment. The police report suggests that there was little sympathy for George because of his being so ‘foreign’ and his having been ‘known to have habitually associated with undesirable characters who frequent low class cafes in the Tottenham Court Road District.’ The police report isn't in the same file as the crime scene photographs and the one of Margaret and Tom at Brighton, but it is important because it shows how George was treated differently by police because of his nationality. Police interpretation of events shaped the evidence that was gathered at the scene. Class, nationality, gender and sexuality were significant factors used by police and counsel to depict the greater or lesser culpability and truthfulness of individuals, and photographs were a key source for their portrayal.

Thinking about what photographs do is useful here because not all the photographs in a case file were meant to do the same thing. My method of using trial transcripts and other supplementary files helps to show what different exhibits of evidence, including photographs, were meant to do in court. Even if the photo of Margaret and Tom wasn't the catalyst that caused George to attack them, injuring Margaret and killing Tom, it was powerful enough to help save him from the gallows.

The issue of photographs as motivators for murder will be explored in part three of this blog post, coming soon. 

The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part one of three

Last month’s blog post was about how my personal experiences have influenced my handling of sources in my research, including photographs. Though photographs of crime scenes are the main source around which my research pivots, I am also interested in the meanings of photographs as material and emotive objects in the files. This blog post in three parts uses four different case studies to explore some of the multiple meanings of photographs in the case files.

Part One: Brian and Moira and what crime scene photographs can do

In the case of the murder of Moira by her husband Brian in Kensal Town in the late 1950s, the photographs in the case file provide a unique window into the past. The building no longer exists, designated a slum at the time the family were living there, and demolished sometime after. Following Moira’s death and Brian’s imprisonment, their neighbours were rehoused under London County Council schemes, and their multiple-occupancy Victorian terrace homes replaced with modern blocks of flats. Historicising this moment of change is complicated. On the one hand historians have argued that more modern buildings with improved facilities and amenities (hot and cold running water, a private toilet for each household, separate entrances, central heating, better cooking and food-storage facilities, fitted kitchens) improved working-class people’s lives in this period. On the other hand, families and communities were dislocated, moved to the suburbs with less easy access to work and kin. Social identities, networks and senses of belonging were eroded, remembered decades later with nostalgic longing.

Brian and Moira’s file provides a fascinating case study of working-class life in post-war London. It illuminates some of the key themes in the historiography of housing and social identity and change in the period, and detailed experiences and meanings can be read from the rich sources. Letters, depositions, statements, observations, evidence lists, plans and trial transcripts in the files, when read critically, have much to say about how this family were experiencing the specific moment of late-1950s London, and what the police and judicial system thought about their home and the way they lived. As I described in my last post, I am acutely aware of the different groups of people who have had an influence on the documents in the files, their provenance, creation and preservation. Trial transcripts, kept in separate files than the majority of the depositions, photographs and other documents, for example, can give details about the processes that brought the evidence into being, and provide points over which details can be contested. 

For example, when questioned about his statement in court, Brian was able to attempt to challenge some of the prosecution counsel's narrative of the crime. His mother, on the other hand, couldn't remember some of the statement she had made to police weeks earlier, and admitted that she drew some of her knowledge of her daughter-in-law's death from newspaper accounts of it. This is important because in every case I have examined from 1930 to 1970, defence and prosecution counsels used details of people's lives and, crucially for my research, their homes, to discredit them as reliable witnesses or sources of truth. Sexual relationships outside of marriage and marital breakdowns were particular points of interest, of which even an insinuation could be used by the court to imply that a witness, defendant or victim was unreliable, untrustworthy, or of poor moral character. But in many cases the domestic behaviour they highlighted had little direct relevance to the murder the defendant was being tried for.

In 1956 Brian and Moira were separated and Moira was living with her family up North. Brian wrote to his wife about coming back, commenting on her condition that he give her ‘a decent home to come home to’, describing how he was doing up their flat. In the middle of his efforts to improve the place on a budget he encountered builders working on the exterior of a neighbouring building who told him that the landlord had stopped the work because London County Council were purchasing the buildings for demolition and rehousing the residents. Brian was ecstatic: ‘We've really hit the jackpot now, Doll!’ he told his wife. This was their ticket to a better home. But his letter reveals that they would struggle to pay the much higher rent of a council flat, and they would have to find the money to outfit their new place with furniture. They didn't have much in their present home. This is interesting because it adds colour and detail to histories of post-war that describe the improvement to working-class people’s quality of life brought about by improved housing. The move wasn't that simple for those with little money. ‘Affluence’ and new consumerism hadn't reached people like Brian and Moira in the late 1950s, a fact to which photographs of their home attest. Even after Brian had made significant improvements, they still had little makeshift furniture, poor facilities for cooking and washing up, shared a toilet with at least two other families, and lived in only two rooms. This photograph of one view of the main living space in their rented flat shows an unfinished home-made chair and wardrobe:

When Brian finished redecorating this room (a few months before the photograph was taken) he described it in his letter to his wife:

'I have decorated the kitchen – after taking down every single piece of wood I had put up plus the hanging cupboard over the cooker… and that wooden waist rail all round the room. I had a helluver lot of plastering to do besides what I found beneath the old wallpaper when I took it off but it has turned out OK. I have bought one of those spray guns and sprayed the ceiling BLACK! and everybody likes it! Used a yellow paper on the complete fireplace wall and a greyish paper on t’other three. Enough paint dripped on the floor to encourage me to spray that as well. I've bought a small (4’ 3” x 2’ 3”) contemporary rug sort of green, black, white and yellow geometric pattern – an Axminster. My new shelves are quite small compared with those you knew and they are in the corner above the cooker and sink. I have started a new fireplace somewhat similar to our other room but it’s even longer! I intend panelling behind the cooker and sink and boxing both in… The skirting, window frame and door have yet to be painted but I haven’t decided on the colour yellow black or red... Incidentally, the old iron fireplace is still there but completely covered.'

His letter features in the case file as an exhibit of evidence, as do the enclosures that came with it: samples of wallpaper. The wallpaper adds colour and depth to the black and white images of the room that were taken as crime scene photos. The photographs themselves are part of the evidence because this was the room where Brian laced his wife’s cup of tea with cyanide and she died.

It is my argument in my thesis that, rather than serving as an investigative tool as we might suspect from common modern representations of CSI (I'm thinking here of shows like Silent Witness where all the details of a crime scene are photographed and recorded, the 'clues' later zoomed-in-on, enhanced and explored), crime scene photographs at this time served more as a sort of surrogate for the space in court. A long history existed, prior to photography being used by police, of coroner’s inquests having an investigative purpose and taking place in the space in which someone was killed and/or a body was found. Following this tradition, the space of the courtroom hosted smaller representations of the space of the crime. Photographs and scale plans of the crime scene acted as aids to the jury’s imagination, allowing them to picture the space in which the narrative they were being presented with by prosecution or defence was situated (or both, since each might try to challenge the other’s narrative of what had taken place, depending on how the defence case was posited).

In the case of Moira's murder by Brian, the photographs and plan demonstrated how close Brian had been standing to his wife when she drank the cup of tea that killed her, making a nonsense of his claims that she had poisoned her own drink while his back was turned. Rather, the prosecution alleged, Brian had made the tea for his wife while she had nipped to the shop for some milk, and stood shaving at the dresser in the corner of the room as she drank it. With the photographs and plans supporting this latter narrative, Brian was found guilty of his wife’s murder at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death. An appeal failed, but he was granted mercy and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Home Office.

In part two of this post I’ll be looking at two cases from the 1930s to explore one of the meanings of photographs in the cases of murder I've analysed: as signifiers of intimate relationships, and what this could mean for witnesses, defendants and victims.