Quiz question: In what year were jurors first allowed to go home while deliberating their verdicts instead of being shut up in a hotel? It’s not as long ago as you might think. Or perhaps you believe the quarantining of jurors should never have been abandoned, given the supposed new dangers of prejudice via Twitter …
Author archives: murdermap
The Jury: Perverting the Course of Justice
Forget the legal inaccuracies, the irrelevant sub-plots and the intrusive commercial breaks. What really killed off ITV’s The Jury was a lack of confidence in courtroom drama. It looked promising enough. Written by the Oscar-nominated author of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, Peter Morgan, The Jury was screened over five consecutive days and starred Julie Walters …
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The Met’s Five Year List of Murders
The Metropolitan Police recently agreed to release details of all ‘murders’ (actually all homicides, including manslaughter) in the last five years following a Freedom of Information request. There are a few discrepancies with our own list of murders but these actually illuminate how the Met records each homicide. The Met already releases monthly totals and …
Hacking scandal’s first victim?
While the hacking scandal is dominating the news, it’s worth remembering a gruesome south London murder 24 years ago. Daniel Morgan, a 37 year-old private investigator, was hacked to death with an axe in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham. His brother Alastair believes that Daniel was killed to stop him …
At the Scene of a Murder
The murder scene is now a stock image of TV and film. A dishevelled detective arrives, crouches down over a dead body, spots something everybody else missed and then makes a smart comment to amuse the audience. With the viewer hooked, the music kicks in and it’s on to the title sequence. You don’t really …