Originally posted by drstrange169
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Baxter KNEW about Robert Paul. He had that material on hand, and so there was no way Mizen was ever going to be able to impress upon the inquest that Lechmere had been the only man in the street apart from himself. He could rely with full certainty on how Lechmere would tell the jury and coroner about how he had trekked from Browns to Mizen in company of another carman.
Ergo, if Mizen wanted to mislead or lie, then he stood no chance at all to succeed on that score - he would be found out and he would quite possibly get in trouble for it.
So that leaves us with the possibility that Mizen "unintentionally misled", which is an option you mentioned together with the two unsavoury ones that have now been dispelled as completely illogical.
Can the matter be looked upon as any misleading at all, intentional OR unintentional? No, it cannot. There was of course never any chance that any such "misleading" would stand, since Lechmere would spill the beans, but that does of course not mean that it could not have happened anyway. But since Baxter intervened, we do not know that Mizen would not have mentioned Paul and it is not until a persons entire statement has been delivered that we can tell what was meant to go into it. And at the end of the day, all we can say is that perhaps Mizen would not have mentioned Paul if he had not been asked about him, and if that was the case, all it would amount to would be Mizen FORGETTING to mention him. To mislead, he would have to OMMITT mentioning Paul.
One could, I guess, semantically construct a situation where somebody forgetting to mention something at an inquest may lead the inquest wrong, but to take it to a lever where we speak of misleading is to mislead ourselves. it is to use a vocabulary that is very negatively laden with no factual basis for it at all. Least of all since the claimed "misleading" in this case would be dissolved minutes afterwards.
No, Dr Strange, it is true that there may be much relevance in how Paul was not spoken about by Mizen until he was asked about him - but that relevance is much different from the one you suggest.
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