Accused faked it!

A speech and hearing therapist said today that murder accused Andrew Pollard pretended to be suffering from hearing loss.

Ben Stabler was the third professional witness to take the stand in Pollard’s murder trial where he stands accused of murdering Onicka Gulliver in March 2014.

Pollard claimed that he suffered days of beatings from police. Among the injuries he said he sustained, was damage to his left ear which affected his hearing.

As the trial continued today, Stabler answered questions posed by defence lawyer Sydney Pinder. He confirmed that he saw Pollard on two or three occasions. He had been referred to him by the late Dr Vincent Clarke for possible hearing loss due to an injury.

Stabler conducted a number of tests including an audio metric evaluation which showed normal hearing in the right ear and a torn eardrum in the left ear.

In explaining the tests, he said that an earplug is placed into the ear and it sends different sound frequencies down the air canal… down to the eardrum, through the middle ear and into the inner ear.

“The inner ear is composed of tiny hair cells which respond to different frequencies or tones. Those tones are sent by the… nerve to the brain. The eardrum sends messages to the brain,” he further explained.

“There was some degree of hearing loss but it should not have caused any great degree of deafness because you can function without an eardrum and still hear…some people don’t have eardrums, they have a hearing loss but they’re not deaf,” he continued.

During cross examination by Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Alliston Seale Stabler was asked to give an account of Pollard’s visit.

Stabler said during the audiometric evaluation the patient hears different tones and has to press a button to signal that he had heard.

Pollard had normal responses in his right ear but when testing the left ear there was no response which Stabler found “suspicious”.

“It’s very interesting because once you apply loud frequencies to one ear and you have a normal ear those sounds are going to cross over from his good ear to his essentially poor ear… so I should get some sort of response from the poor ear. I got none. Suspicion number 1, it just doesn’t happen,” he charged.

Another test, done by Stabler, showed that when sounds were sent down both the right and left ears, Pollard’s brain was responding to those sounds. This indicated that the inner ears were “normal”. “So there was definitely no hearing loss there, except for the mild hearing loss because of a dysfunctional eardrum,” the doctor noted.

“So if I pretend I can’t hear my brain would still pick up the wave…I can’t even trick my brain?” Seale asked.

“If his left inner ear was nonfunctional you would see these responses would be buried in the noise floor…no hearing, no response.. it just wouldn’t show,” Stabler responded to Seale.

Stabler said that Pollard was malingering and wasn’t pressing the button when he should have been.

The therapist also referred to another examination on a later date where Pollard went from allegedly hearing “nothing” to having “moderate hearing loss”.

“The left hear that couldn’t hear suddenly began hearing?” Seale asked to which Stabler agreed.

“This doesn’t happen unless it is a sensory loss and the inner ear is damaged … hearing doesn’t come back…it doesn’t happen,” Stabler explained.

The trial continues tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in the No. 2 Supreme Court with Dr Ross Herbert taking the stand. Justice Randall Worrell is presiding.