Jury Go Home

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 and the internet?

But first imagine being a juror in the 19th century. When it came to deciding the case, the twelve men (it could only be men, between the ages of 21 and 60 and with the required property qualification) could be kept without ‘fire, food or water’ until they reached a verdict. This famously happened in 1670 when a jury refused to find William Penn and Willaim Meade guilty of unlawful assembly.

The Jury, John Morgan (1861)
The Jury, John Morgan (1861). Credit: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

Deadlocked or ‘hung’ juries were apparently not allowed until after 1865, and their decision had to be unanimous rather than the 10 to 2 majority accepted today. Some juries made their choice between guilty and not guilty without even leaving the court.

The Juries Act 1870 gave the judge discretion on how the jury were ‘kept’, and if the trial did not finish within a day they were normally taken to a hotel. At that time a room at the Manchester hotel in the City was reserved for Old Bailey cases.

Jurors were allowed to ‘separate’ during the trial itself from 1948 (Criminal Justice Act, section 35), but for the crucial deliberations they would be shut away from the outside world.

In the year 2011, once the judge has summed up the case, the court usher swears to keep the jury in some “private and convenient place” to prevent them from speaking to anyone until they have reached a verdict.

If by the end of the day they have not agreed a decision they are allowed to go home on condition they do not research or discuss the case until all 12 are present the next morning.

When was the first jury allowed to go home? 1995. The law was changed in 1994 (Section 43 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, effective on February 3, 1995). And on February 16 the Central News Agency reported that legal history had been made during the trial of Melanie Myers, 20, and Clifton Quartey, 18.

Myers and Quartey were accused of stabbing minicab driver and father-of-three Mazhar Hussain, 39, to death during a botched robbery in Wembley, northwest London.

After spending the night at home, the jury returned to continue their deliberations and a few hours later convicted Myers of murder and Quartey of manslaughter. Myers was jailed for life and Quartey was sentenced to four years in a young offenders institution.

The changes in the way the justice system has treated juries over the years suggests that ordinary members of the public are being trusted more and more to do their duty despite the potential risk of interference and prejudicial information.

Could this trend go further? Perhaps in the future juries will be allowed to hear the legal arguments of prosecution and defence counsel about the admissibility of evidence, and be able to ignore irrelevant background information. Perhaps the online newspapers and Twitterers/Tweeters will one day be able to comment on trials in progress without fear of prejudice (like in the United States, although the defence can apply to have the jury ‘sequestred’).

Perhaps one day juries will not be treated so much like naughty children and the media not viewed as a scandal-mongering beast capable of perverting the brains of anyone it touches. It seems unlikely, given recent events.

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Further reading:

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Judges and Juries.

Bentley, David, English Criminal Justice in the 19th Century (1998)

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 as an admirably irritating defence QC with a touching addiction to nicotine.

According to Morgan, it sought to ‘unlock the personal stories’ of the jury ‘by having a crime whodunnit going right through it like a skewer.’

Julie Walters QC in The Jury

The whodunnit part was reasonable enough, and seemed to be partly based on the case of Barry George, the man convicted and then acquitted of the murder of Jill Dando following the exclusion of microscopic forensic evidence.

Its real stars were the jurors, a disparate bunch all with their own problems to sort out at the same time as deciding the fate of an alleged serial killer. The teacher having an affair with a student, the immigrant hoping to move to America, the firefighter obsessed with getting a tan.  So far, so melodramatic. It was after all a fictional drama, and perhaps the disregard for reality wasn’t that important. As it happened, many of the complaints about inaccuracies (a lot of them from lawyers) were themselves inaccurate.*

But what really undermined it was the lack of screen time given to the court process itself. The fictional trial lasted only five days, featured only three or four witnesses, speeches from both counsel and the evidence of the man on trial. It was probably only about 30 minutes out of the total five hours. There was some nice banter between the barristers, a few feisty exchanges with witnesses and a shrewd juror realising they weren’t being told the full story (they hardly ever are). But given that cameras are excluded from criminal trials in the UK, it was a massive missed opportunity.

Instead of courtroom drama, we got a succession of sub-plots all tacked on to each other in the hope that the viewer wouldn’t get bored. ‘WTF? Why is the juror writing to the defendant?’ ‘Who is that crazy woman trying to pervert the trial?’ ‘OMG she’s impersonating a juror!’ ‘You can’t look up a case on the internet!’ ‘Witnesses aren’t allowed to talk to jurors!’ It resulted in frustration rather than anticipation.

Private Eye’s ‘Remote Controller’ probably put it best when he wrote: ‘The material frequently suffers from the apradox of many TV legal procedurals. Although the shows are presumably commissioned because of the belief that the process is interesting, panic rapidly sets in that it isn’t interesting enough. So every jury has a juicy personal dilemma nad events such as jury-nobbling and impersonation of a juror, which must in reality be very rare, hover over proceedings.’

The audience, like the jury, was asked to reach its own verdict based on a meagre explanation of the evidence and some table-thumping commentary from the barristers. The fingerprint on the glass in one victim’s bedroom, the mobile phone ‘pinpointed’ at another’s home, the internet dates with all three women. Oh, and the bit of blanket found in the suspect’s car, which the jury wasn’t meant to know about.

There was also a staggering disregard for the victims’ families. Where were they? Oh, that’s right, they were represented by a sister and a brother who wilfully sought to pervert the course of justice and imprison an innocent man. It’s no wonder that John Cooper QC called it ‘insulting to victims of crime.’**

So for the next series (and there definitely should be a second series, despite the failure of the first), let’s have a bit more ambition. Ten hour-long episodes. Hell, make it twenty. Keep the audience hooked by exploring character rather than a succession of unnecessary and over-cooked subplots. If The Killing and the Wire can do it, why can’t The Jury? Have confidence in the courtroom, and the people within it.

*The legal advisor for The Jury was Colin Aylott, a ‘specialist defence advocate’. I expect he is now getting a lot of stick.

** Public reactions on Twitter included: ‘omg this is so scary’, ‘judi dench u rock’ [sic], ‘I know i have the attention span of a 2 year old but this is SO slow’, ‘chill out legal tweeters, it’s a drama, it’s not trying to be a documentary’, ‘the jury ended well, could have been two nights though’, ‘I want to be a barrister so bad… and i want to be a juror one day’, ‘well that’s five hours wasted.. preposterous plot twists, three jury members compromised, overacted, overegged melodrama’, and ‘perfect ending for the jury would have been final shot of juror who went off with alan lane dead in her flat.’

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 a breakdown for each borough via its website but gives no other details to allow easy comparison.

First thing to note is they are only giving the name, age, recorded date and borough, but the Guardian has been able to use the data for its own map. The pdf released by the Metropolitan police has been deleted from their website.

Other findings:

  • The ‘recorded date’ does not refer to the date of the attack or death of the victim, but to the date the Met recorded it as a murder. For example: Eric Mills was attacked in January 2008 and died in December 2009. The Met’s date of August 4, 2011, refers to the day the suspect was charged with murder.
  • The spellings of victims names differ from those given previously by police or heard in court. Others are known by different names, such as Nazarine Samuel, also known as Beryl Gilchrist, June 25, 2010.
  • There are some cases that appear never to have been reported in the media, or publicised by the Met, which remain unsolved/undetected (updates in italics):
  1. Andrew Isles, 30, June 26, 2011, Enfield – according to the Met this case is officially classified as ‘unexplained’.
  2. Michael Porter, 56, June 8, 2011, Southwark – no details held by Met press office. Likely to be historical. Further FOI request needed to seek details.
  3. Joelle Ayinla Munroe, 1, April 18, 2011, Lambeth – police press release issued without name of child, a two month old boy who died after suffering head injuries. Man and woman arrested but later released without further action. No further details available from Met, suggesting case closed.
  4. Michael Winn, 12, March 4, 2011, Camden – no details given by Met press office at time of writing, but the case eventually came to court in July 2014.
  5. Keith Needell, 84, January 31, 2011, Haringey –  Press release issued in August 2011, suspect charged with attempted murder, police awaiting further postmortem. (Case went to court in March 2012)
  6. Twelve year-old girl and ten year-old boy (names anonymised at request of family), November 1, 2010, Ealing – actually relates to a historical case. An open verdict was returned at an inquest into their deaths in June 2001.
  7. Jack Vincent, 1, July 7, 2010, Havering – victim’s mother, a member of MPS staff, pleaded guilty to child cruelty in February 2011. Her sentence was later cut on appeal to 16 months.
  8. Stephen Holmes, 46, April 14, 2010, Haringey – historical case dating back to 1970s – this is said to be the first victim of Dennis Nilsen, who was 14 when he disappeared.
  9. Chelsey Butcher, 30, October 2, 2008, Hounslow.
  1. Manji Hirani, 48, December 10, 2009, Brent. The suspect was charged with manslaughter and acquitted.
  2. Seamus Gill, 50, December 10, 2009, Ealing. The suspect was charged with murder but acquitted of both murder and manslaughter.
  3. Tom Hoyne and Chelsea Wright, March 18, 2009, Bexley. A suspect was charged with manslaughter but only stood trial on a health and safety charge. Tom Hoyne survived, which may explain why the ‘count’ column in his case reads ‘0’.

Some conclusions:

Not all of the cases listed are murder cases. A couple every year are manslaughter cases, while a small number are not officially homicides at all (i.e. unexplained deaths).

The practice of using a ‘recorded date’ and the method of adding historical cases does skew the statistics slightly but as this happens every year it is probably not signficant.

Having said that, it appears that five out of the 94 cases listed for 2011 (up to September 7) could be removed from the list, either because they relate to a different year or are not true homicides. Which means I could improve the figures by 5.3 per cent just by changing how they are recorded. Tempting, eh?

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 exposing significant police corruption.

One of the suspects in the case was Morgan’s business partner Jonathan Rees, who exploited a network of police officers to sell stories to tabloid newspapers about the activities of celebrities, politicians and royalty. It is thought he was also able to hack into bank and phone accounts. It has even been suggested he commissioned burglars to gather material for scoops.

In 2000 Rees was arrested and jailed for six years for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice following a plot to plant cocaine on a model called Kim James. What happened when he was released from prison in 2004? He went to work for the News of the World, which was then edited by Andy Coulson.

Andy Coulson resigned in 2007 after the Royal Editor at the paper was jailed for hacking into the phones of the staff of Princes William and Harry. He then went to work as a ‘spin doctor’ for Prime Minister David Cameron until he was forced out in January 2011 because of new revelations about phone hacking.

There have been five investigations into the Daniel Morgan murder. It has now been admitted that the first was damaged by police corruption. The last one collapsed in March this year. The case remains unsolved.

Now that the Prime Minister has ordered public inquiries into the hacking scandal, we think it’s time one was ordered into the Daniel Morgan case.

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 have time to think about the person who has died, let alone feel anything.

This doesn’t apply to real life murder scenes. The first one I remember seeing in London was just down the road from my house. There was no body visible, just a forensics tent on the pavement. These tents, usually white and yellow, are well known to the public through media reports. When you see one you know what it means, even if you don’t know what has happened. In that particular case it was another nine months before the case reached the Old Bailey and I found out that a teenage boy had stabbed his stepdad to death.

Once erected at the scene, the tent can remain in place for up to 48 hours as paper-suited investigators search for evidence. With advances in DNA and other forensic techniques, the smallest find can be crucial. But even when the tent has been packed up and taken away a few signs still remain. Leftover police tape fluttering from lampposts and fences. Discarded medical equipment and wrapping. Discoloured sand, scattered around to soak up any pools of blood.

Some scenes – usually those involving young victims killed on the street – are marked by temporary shrines made up of flowers, candles and stuffed toys, often attached to personal messages of love, grief and despair. Others return to normality almost straight away, as if nothing had ever happened. Many are permanently out of view inside private bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms.

It is this variety that the photographer Antonio Olmos captures in his project The Landscape of Murder. The idea is simple but time-consumingly ambitious – photograph every murder scene in London in one year. He’s been going for eight months now. Eight months and nearly eighty homicides across the capital, from Croydon to Enfield and Harlington to Romford, building up an alternative picture of ‘Austerity Britain’.

Last week it was the turn of Ilford in east London. Kelvin Chibueze, 17, had been stabbed to death in the early hours of Monday 15 August, the ninth teenage homicide victim of 2011. The details were vague, but he had been found injured in a car park following a clash between two groups of between 15 and 20 people.

It turned out the car park, for customers of Lidl, Fitness First and Farmfoods, was almost directly opposite the police station. Officers had rushed out on hearing shouts and bottles smashing and found Kelvin lying with a stab wound to the chest. He died in hospital at 1pm.

Two days later, only a few hours after the forensics officers had left the scene for good, the area was relatively busy for a Wednesday afternoon. It was cloudy but bright and warm. Vehicles drove in and out, families did their shopping, passers-by passed by.

It was no doubt a coincidence that the car parking space where Kelvin Chibueze bled to death was empty. At one end was a dark patch of ground which could have been mistaken for an oil leak. A few yards away a short piece of torn police tape had been left attached to a steel barrier.

There were no flowers at the scene but around the corner a group of Kelvin’s friends had gathered around a bench with their bouquets. They were clearly distrustful of the media and photographers, particularly if they were from the tabloids. Later they were to shout at and confront one of these ‘snappers’ who tried to take sneak shots of them from a distance.

Friends of Kelvin Chibueze pay their respects at the scene in Ilford

By contrast, Antonio – who works for the Observer – won them over by being open, straightforward and polite and asked for permission. After discussing it among themselves, and seeing examples of his previous work, they agreed to let him take photographs as they stood in silence, hugging each other, talking quietly, cradling flowers. This wasn’t staged – there were no directions or pleas to look at the camera. They were left to pay tribute in their own way while Antonio stood by his tripod for just over an hour, waiting for the scene to arrange itself.

At some locations he has spent the better part of a day waiting for a shot. Often people approach to ask what he is doing, question him about the murder or even offer an opinion. Their reactions are as varied as the scenes themselves. A few yards from a teenage stabbing in Welling he witnessed a brief scuffle between rival gangs. Two youths even flashed their knives. Once he was approached by the mother of a boy who had been killed in the same area a few years earlier. At another scene in south London local shopkeepers told him the victim was a known thief, while in Ilford a man wanted to know the colour of the victim.

Murdered teenagers like Kelvin make bigger headlines, and for good reason at a time of growing concern for the future. But there are many more who go unremembered, unnoticed by the media and represented only by Home Office statistics. One of the ideas behind murdermap was to record and remember every victim, regardless of the ‘story’, and by doing so illuminate the hidden, darker sides of London. The photographs that make up ‘The Landscape of Murder’ do the same thing in a different way. And maybe, as the cliche goes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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Antonio Olmos, whose other work can be seen on his website antonioolmos.com, has written about his project in the Observer – ‘When the city streets are visited by death‘ – July 10, 2011.

A slideshow of pictures from The Landscape of Murder can be seen on the Radio Netherlands website.