10 things the Daily Mail got wrong about the trial of Mark Alexander mistake #9

[Daisy]

“Mark maintained that Sami was living with him in London.”

“Mark said he was living in a close Egyptian community in London with friends.”

The semantics are important here because one could be forgiven for thinking that “living with him in London” quite literally means living under the same roof, when in fact it means living in the same city.  This very confusion in fact arose at my trial, where one particular witness made the honest mistake of conflating the two.  The Honourable Judge Reddihough explained in his summing up that although JP had “made a presumption” to this effect, he “agreed that Mark had never told him personally that his father was living with him.”

Certainly, when I came home in the New Year to find the house empty, I could only assume that dad was staying with friends from the Coptic Church.  I explain why in an earlier post.