Charles Ingram was innocent

[Aractus]

Here is the unaired episode:

https://youtu.be/siXq83o_qhM

So, I know what many of you were thinking. But he was convicted. Well yes - but we know that many innocent people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit - many of them far more serious offences than this. What I am going to argue is that Charles Ingram didn't have the means, the opportunity, or even the motivation to commit such a fraud. Let's begin.

First let's recap the crown's theory, or rather hypothesis against Ingram. Here's how the hypothesis went - Ingram and his wife, Mrs Ingram colluded with a fellow contestant, Tecwen Whittock, who they had never met in person prior to the day to "signal" Ingram correct answers by coughing when the right answer came up. Seems like a simple enough case, right?

Well this brings us to the first point - the means.

In order to conduct this sophisticated fraud, someone had to be on the phone with someone outside the studio to research the answers on the interweb, all the while whilst this unidentified mystery person (or rather two mystery people never identified) then page Whittock so that he can then cough up the right answers. Right, got it. Wait, no we don't. There's no way for anyone outside the studio on the phone to know what questions are being asked - it's not as if that can be paged to them, except perhaps in Morse code, and even then if we had that level of sophistication why didn't Ingram just wear the paging device himself? Sounds a lot safer, and not to mention simpler, than having a stranger paged so that he can cough in the audience. They didn't know they would be frisked at the end of filming - and when they were the producers found nothing.

Now you might say well they did record coughing and alleged that 19 of them were "significant" roughly 1 in ten coughs from the audience, or at least that's what the audio prepared by the TV network had on it - a total of 192 coughs, but only 19 ones used to "signal" the answer - allegedly. Even if we accept that, that's only a minor part of the means, there's two other parts that have to fit together for it to work: 1. Ingram needs to be able to hear the signal and understand it, and 2. Whittock needs to be getting fed the information. There was never once any evidence bought forward to suggest that either of those two conditions were met - thus the prosecution only ever had evidence for a fraction of the means.

Right, now is where it gets interesting. Professor Alyn Morice from Hull University testified in the 2003 court case for the defence as an expert witness on respiratory illnesses. He found that Whittock was suffering from both perennial rhinitis and cough variant asthma, and each condition causes chronic coughing. So now we know that even if Whittock wanted to, he couldn't control his coughing - at least not in a consistent way that would allow the Major to decipher which was the correct "win" signal. That should just about put the nail in the lid of the coffin for establishing the means, however there is one more piece of evidence, which according to the Daily Mail couldn't be presented in 2003 because the science hadn't been proven. But it has since been peer-review published, and you would be able to enter this evidence into court today, and this is the fact that the voice-prints for the 19 "significant" coughs show that they actually came from not just one person, but two. This evidence also comes from Professor Morice.

Another interesting thing to note is that after the General won the £1m, Whittock won the next place, and he bombed out on £1k. If he was wearing pagers that allowed someone outside the studio to feed him the information on the winning option, then he would have been able to use that information for himself - without coughing it - to win his own £1m. So why did he bomb out on just £1k?

Opportunity is the next part of the puzzle.

Now here is perhaps the biggest piece of evidence for actual innocence. For two reasons. The people who do well on these types of game shows have two characteristics - they all have these two characteristics. One: they get lucky. Two: they are willing to take chances. This is exactly what we see in the video above - Ingram seems to genuinely struggle with the £1000 question, but he reasons it through and gives the right answer as an educated guess. Other contestants who are less willing to take chances will use up their lifelines, and not be able to progress as far. It's an interesting dilemma for a constant to face - because they aren't just risking the 1K at that point, they're risking their total eventual winnings. This is what his wife did as well on the show - she went for a question without using a lifeline because she wanted to take the risk so she could progress further. When Charles returns for the second evening of questions, the first thing he tells the host when asked "what's your strategy" is that he's going to lock in answers if he feels he knows them. In other words he's going to play more risky. The more you gamble the more you can win, if you're lucky. It's a dead simple concept.

Now let's note that despite the video's claim, it's not "unedited". The coughs are enhanced (but only the 19 they're interested in bringing to our attention, and not the other 170-odd coughs recorded). What I want you to notice is there are several questions where Charles struggles, including the £16k question, the £32k question, and there are no coughs to be heard (other than he's wife who's coughs certainly wouldn't have been audible to him in the centre seat!) The other thing he might also be trying to do is read clues from the host. I don't know what the UK version was like, but in the Australian version Eddie used to say "are you sure" a lot more and in a distinctive way whenever he knew that the contestant's answer was wrong. Perhaps Charles has picked up on this with the UK host. What's even more incredible is the fact that Eddie's obvious "are you sure" questions often went ignored by the contestants - suggesting that they either didn't know about his massive tell (which let's face it everyone knew about), or they couldn't concentrate on the host to notice the cue. Yes he switches his mind on the £32k question you might claim that's suspicious - but he's just having a guess... and watching that question I think he might be picking up a cue from the host.

In the very next question, the £64k question he picks "Cricket" and sticks through it after reasoning through all the options and locks it in - despite being unsure. And if he really didn't know the answer and was relying on coughs why would he say at the start "I think it could be cricket" instead of "hmm, cricket comes to mind, blah blah blah". On the very next question, he does exactly the same thing. He says at the start "I've seen it and I think it's Holbein", he doesn't change his mind, he reasons through the other options and locks it in, willing to risk £32k on the answer. The next question he does the same thing again "I think it's a hat", he doesn't mention a single other option and locks it in. So there's three question in a row where he clearly didn't need anyone's assistance, he never changes his mind, yet coughs are highlighted as if they're significant here. With these three questions he gave himself no opportunity to benefit from the "coughing code". The final two questions are the only ones that might look a bit suspicious, because he changes his mind from what he first said he thought was right.

But, also do take into account that the final question was an easy question. A really easy question. Even if you didn't know what a googol is, it's easy to work out. Perhaps not today now that Google is an advertising giant - but as the world's most popular search engine it should be quite intuitive to work out that it is named after a really large number. But even if you're stupid enough not to work that out - look at the other options. "Megatron", "Gigabit", and "Nanomole". Megatron isn't even a number (neither for that matter is nanomole but we'll get to that), "Gigabit" refers to a unit of data - Giga + bit. Bit means one, Giga means 1billion, thus it means 1 billion bits. Anyone can work that out. They can at least work out it's a workable number - 1 followed by 100 zeros is not a workable number, there isn't even close to that number of subatomic particles in the known universe. And finally Nanomole. Nano + mole - anyone can work out what that is, a tiny fraction of a mole. Giga is 109, Nano is 10-9, and the mole is the weight of 12g of Carbon-12 atoms, which is (something like) 6.0221×1023 particles of C12. However you don't need to know that, as that number is Avogadro's constant, a mole is simply 12g of an element or compound. So it's not a number used for counting, it's a weight. Do you see "grams" or any other unit in the question? No, so you can eliminate it right away once you know it needs a unit to be meaningful. A nanomole is 1.2*10-8 grams. Again he doesn't need to know that much detail, all he needs to know is that "nano" means tiny, that "gigabit" is a workable number, and "megatron" is not a number, but a comic character.

And this is what he appears to do in the last question - he eliminates the other options to arrive at googol. And he does the two other things I said at the start he needs to do - take risks and get lucky.

Let's also quote the Daily Mail here:

Yes, Diana Ingram and Whittock were known to each other through their mutual passion for game shows, and had indeed been in contact on several occasions, including the night before the recording and at lunchtime on the day of it — calls lasting a total of eight minutes — although they had never met.

When Ingram discovered this, he said later he was furious 'to the point of divorce'. 'I was angry', he acknowledged, 'I could see how it would throw a very different complexion on events. It looked dreadful.'

Okay, so one contestant was talking to the wife of the other contestant. So what? I'll bet that's not the first time this has happened, and anyway how are you going to set up a sophisticated fraud in just 8 minutes of phone calls - with a stranger you don't even know you can trust? Even assuming they did collude to commit fraud, when did they have the opportunity to plant a phone or a microphone, connected to someone outside who could listen in on the questions? And if they did that who are the two additional people they colluded with? See, without two more co-conspirators there's no opportunity to commit the fraud. And if there were two, then in the police investigation that cost millions (or so it was reported) how is it they couldn't find someone who was known to either Ingram or Whittock who placed a telephone call lasting the better part of the duration of the show's filming? Even with this elaborate plan, there's just no opportunity to execute it. No proven opportunity in this case anyway.

So finally this brings us to motive.

I suppose some people might just sway "£1m is enough motive for anyone"... well, possibly. But you also have to look at the character of the person. If they're a conman they do this kind of thing all the time, no one's going to start their conning career with such a bold move. You start smaller - in a casino perhaps, or committing some other kind of fraud. Yet the Ingrams never committed any known previous frauds or cons. So they've lived their whole lives to this point, we're to believe, without ever wanting to commit a fraud and then they suddenly get incited by the prospect of £1m? I don't think so. It might be plausible, but it's at best a speculation.

So to summarise.

Firstly, this is TV. And one of the worst kinds of television - reality television. Game shows are well known to rip off contestants, and to weasel their way out of coughing up winnings.
They didn't have the means to commit the fraud in the way alleged.
They didn't have the opportunity either, even if they did have the means.
And they didn't have the motive.
And perhaps most importantly of all, the evidence now shows that the 19 "significant coughs" were not made by a single person in the audience, but by two separate people.

Thoughts?

Here's another article by another journalist, Jon Ronson, who sat through the trial.

[Jollocks]

Just in reply, as this was the thread which brought me to join the site.
"And finally Nanomole. Nano + mole - anyone can work out what that is, a tiny fraction of a mole. Giga is 109, Nano is 10-9, and the mole is the weight of 12g of Carbon-12 atoms, which is (something like) 6.0221×1023 particles of C12. However you don't need to know that, as that number is Avogadro's constant, a mole is simply 12g of an element or compound. So it's not a number used for counting, it's a weight. Do you see "grams" or any other unit in the question? No, so you can eliminate it right away once you know it needs a unit to be meaningful. A nanomole is 1.2*10-8 grams."

This is actually incorrect. A mole is a measurement of constituents (e.g., atoms or molecules) within a given substance, which equals Avo's number c. 6.02×10^23. It is only a fixed mass with reference to a specific substance, and therefore only equal to 12g when the substance is the C-12 isotope of carbon. Generally, we use a mole to be representative of the average atomic weight in grams, although it's simpler and more reasonable to use the atomic number for most basic calculations.
An easy way to understand this is if one mole of sodium reacts with one mole of chlorine, the yield is one mole of sodium chloride ions, rather than two moles, as the resulting salt contains the same number of ions as there are atoms in each of the reactants.

Hope this helps