‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.
‘Absolutely fine,’ he said, ‘tomorrow we’ll get the jury sworn.’
I walked back to chambers with Kelly.
‘What do you think of Charlie?’ I asked her.
‘I think he’s going to find this tough,’ she said, ‘he’s good, but he’s fragile. I just hope he makes it to the end.’
‘So do I,’ I said, ‘otherwise I’ll be stepping into the breach.’
‘Yep,’ she said, ‘and we don’t want that do we?’
Which wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for.
The trial of Tasha Roux day two – the jury
Our Judge was Mr Justice Vernon, a gruff Lancastrian with a rather no-nonsense approach and a wonderful gift for the crushing look of disapproval, something he had demonstrated the previous day, when Fish had to concede that he had served a load of new evidence on the defence at the last minute, and that we were not going to be able to start the trial.
The next morning, the Judge looked witheringly at Roger Fish. ‘No more surprises for Mr Parkman today then?’
‘No, My Lord,’ said Fish (and you’ll note he used the proper My Lord way to address a High Court Judge, as opposed to Your Honour, which is the way one addresses a Circuit Judge. I’m telling you this, just in case you ever have to appear in front of a court).
‘Good.’
We were ready to start.
And the first part of any trial process involves the swearing in of the jury.
‘Can we empanel a jury?’ asked the Judge.
‘Yes, My Lord.’
We then waited for about five minutes until the door that led to the jury room opened and into the light of the courtroom traipsed twenty or so nervous-looking individuals.
At this moment, none of them have the faintest idea what the trial is going to be about. It is still an adventure. I have often looked over at a jury if a rather trivial charge is read out and watched as their faces express either relief or disappointment; and, conversely, if the charge involves a sexual offence or violence against a woman, I have seen a look closely resembling fear or horror.
This was my first murder, so I watched the jury closely. Some of them were impassive as the word ‘murder’ left the lips of the Court Clerk, others glanced towards the dock where Tasha sat. Poor Tasha. Kelly had purchased her a smart skirt and blouse – she looked like a temp, a scared temp. She sat facing forward towards the Court Clerk, her eyes were wide and no doubt her heart was beating as fast as it had ever done. I felt sorry for her.
In America, there is a tradition of challenging jurors, indeed, if you believe John Grisham – and I’ve no reason to doubt him – there are even specialist jury lawyers whose sole job is to vet potential jurors to make sure that any who might conceivably be prejudiced against their client are removed.
Thankfully, we have nothing like that in the UK. In the UK, just as long as someone has never met the defendant or any of the witnesses and is compos mentis enough to utter the oath (they don’t even have to read it), then they’re in.
This doesn’t stop some very senior lawyers, or very stupid lawyers, trying occasionally to wheedle out those who they think might be biased. In one famous case a Silk asked the Judge to exclude anyone who was from an ethnic background from sitting on the jury of a man accused of sending racist letter-bombs.
‘Those are my instructions,’ said the old Silk.
‘Well your instructions are a load of cobblers,’ said the Judge.
Then there was a quite recent case, when another very senior and well-paid Silk tried to prevent anyone who was a member of a trade union from sitting on the jury of the former editor of the News of the World. You’d have to have some front to make that application – again, the Judge wasn’t having any of it.
For me, the most controversial thing I have ever had to cope with in terms of juries is when, two days into a trial, a very attractive female juror (there is almost always one) declared that one of her fellow jurors had been taking photos of her on the sly with his mobile phone.
‘What do you want me to do?’ the Judge asked me.
And I have to admit, I hadn’t a clue. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do, it was certainly a creepy thing to do, but did it prevent either juror from carrying out their role properly? I didn’t know. I think it came down to the age-old test of whether the Judge liked the cut of the juror’s jib. He didn’t, and so the creepy juror was discharged and told to behave himself in future.
Tasha Roux’s jury was the usual mixture. The initial panel of twenty was whittled down by ballot to twelve. Twelve men good and true – or in Tasha’s case, seven women and five men.
I listened intently as each of them took the oath and started to ask myself questions that I couldn’t possibly answer: was having more women than men a good thing? Possibly, because women might feel compassion towards another woman, but then, possibly not, as they might feel sorry for the deceased, they might be mothers with sons or have brothers or boyfriends who they wouldn’t like to see being pushed over a banister.
Was it a good thing if someone affirmed rather than swore on the Bible? Again, traditionally it was believed to be a good thing to have a few ‘affirmers’ as it was once thought that ‘affirmers’ were more liberal and therefore would be more likely to go soft on the defendant; but these days it is thought that perhaps an ‘affirmer’ might be more attuned to the evidence, and less likely to reach a verdict on a hunch – which might be bad.
These were the imponderables. These were the pointless questions I couldn’t possibly hope to answer.
I looked at the men and wondered whether they were the type who might go for a pint down their local and want to bring back hanging, or the type who would vote Liberal Democrat and listen to Radio 4. I watched and listened and I made pointless generalisations and suppositions about twelve of my fellow human beings based solely on what they looked like and how they spoke. It was as pointless as it was stupid, yet most barristers do exactly the same thing.
After the last of the twelve had been sworn, I turned to the dock and looked up at Tasha. ‘Okay?’ I mouthed.
She nodded without smiling, indeed without any change in her facial expression. The trial was about to start, and it would start with Roger Fish’s opening.
Roger Fish’s opening speech
Just as Roger Fish was about to open the case for the Crown, just as all eyes turned on him, he did something unusual – he picked up his pens and very calmly and slowly placed them on the desk behind him. He then picked up his one single folder and placed that on top of the other folders that were already on the desk behind him; then, without any sense of urgency, he calmly poured a glass of water from the carafe in front of him, and took a sip from it.
Then, finally, he looked at the jury.
They were mesmerised. Each one of them had watched his every move. Spellbound. He looked at them, placed his hands on the lectern in front of him, and, quietly, but with absolute and compelling authority, he began. ‘Miss Tasha Roux is in the dock.’ He paused. ‘She is in the dock because she pushed a man over the banister from a sixth-floor landing. That push caused him to fall to his death. You may look at her and her life at times during this trial and feel that she is deserving of your sympathy – but, you must also remember that the man she killed, her lover, Gary Dickinson, was not in any way deserving of death in that rather brutal manner.’
It was a tour de force, a brilliant opening speech that continued for about another forty minutes, as Roger Fish told the jury what the case was about, laying the seeds in their heads as to why Tasha was guilty.
It was now that I realised why Fish was held in such high regard, as he elegantly turned the courtroom into a theatre, and why those advocates who are able to stand up and demand everyone’s attention, like great actors, are the ones who are truly brilliant.
Fish had control. Fish could command, he was a superb mix of Shakespearian actor and Roman Consul. Some s
niffy lawyers with none of his stature or ability might disagree, they might call him overly theatrical, a bit hammy – they are wrong. I was enthralled, and petrified, by Roger Fish; everything seemed so effortless, so controlled, and over the next few days, the way in which he presented his case left me in awe.
Just before he ended his opening speech he looked at the jury in such a way that he seemed to focus, in one magical moment, in one mesmeric instant, a gaze upon each of them both collectively and individually, and said, ‘You will decide this case, ladies and gentlemen, not me, not His Lordship the Judge and not Mr Parkman who represents Miss Roux, you – and you will do so, ladies and gentlemen, not because you feel sorry for someone, or because you are revolted by someone else, but on the evidence. That is all I ask.’
Then he sat down. It sent a shiver through me that started somewhere near my feet and ended up in my wig. It was bloody magnificent.
The witnesses for the Crown
Roger Fish called his first witness: Mrs Shamilia Hussain.
The jury waited and Mrs Hussain was brought into the courtroom.
It’s a funny thing, being a witness. Unless you are a police officer or an expert, being a witness is almost always about fate: the fact that you happened to be somewhere at a particular time, the fact that you happened to be looking in a particular direction at a given moment, the fact that you happened to hear a conversation that wasn’t meant for your ears.
Mrs Hussain happened to have been a neighbour of Tasha Roux and, as fortune would have it, was awake when Tasha and Gary Dickinson were arguing; she could have done nothing, but she didn’t, she opened the door, looked out and had seen parts of what had been going on. Because of this twist of fate, she was a witness in a Crown Court in a murder trial, and her words, just like the other witnesses in the case, had the potential to lead to a lifetime of imprisonment for Tasha Roux.
A single nuance here, a slight fib there, a half-remembered memory turning into an unequivocal assertion could see my client convicted of murder.
I have to say that the thought of capital cases, when someone might end up getting hung on the words and memory and ability to articulate those memories of another person, sends a shiver of revulsion right through me – I don’t think I could be a lawyer in a system where the state is allowed to kill people.
Mrs Hussain is quite a fair witness.
Fish takes her through her story:
She didn’t know the defendant very well, just to say hello to, and she had never had a conversation with the deceased; in the past, she had heard shouting and arguments coming from the defendant’s flat.
She remembered the night of the death because she was annoyed at being awoken by the sound of slamming doors and raised voices. She then heard a voice that she thought was a man’s voice shouting, ‘You do this every time, Tasha, you do this every time.’
‘What was the tone of that voice?’ asked Fish.
Mrs Hussain thought for a second, then added, ‘Annoyed, he sounded annoyed.’
‘What happened next?’ asked Fish.
‘There was a pause,’ said Mrs Hussain, ‘then I heard like a growl, as though someone was charging.’
‘What did you hear next?’
‘Next I heard more screaming, followed by sobbing.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Fishmeister, who then smiled, perhaps a bit too sweetly, to ensure that the jury knew he was happy with the way the witness had given her evidence.
Charlie got to his feet. I was sitting directly behind him, next to me was Kelly. I was conscious that he had not risen to his feet in a Crown Court for over fifteen years. He looked quite small.
He picked up Mrs Hussain’s statement and pretended to look through it for a second. ‘Mrs Hussain,’ he said, his face contorted into an expression of perplexed confusion, ‘I’ve got the statement that you made here, to the police on the morning when all this happened.’
Mrs Hussain nodded. Charlie continued, ‘You made that statement at,’ he paused for effect, ‘six-thirty in the morning, so about an hour or so after the incident.’
Mrs Hussain nodded again.
‘So when you made that statement, things would have been fairly fresh in your memory?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fresher than, say, today, six months later?’
Mrs Hussain didn’t answer this question, as she was bright enough to know where this was leading.
‘You see Mrs Hussain, today, six months later, you’ve told this court that you heard a growl like a charge, yet you made no mention of that to the police two hours after the event?’
Charlie looked up at her as he finished his question. It was the classic line of cross-examination that arises when a witness says something in court that they didn’t say when they were interviewed by the police. It almost always confuses a witness.
‘Any reason for that?’
‘Sorry?’
Charlie raised his voice slightly. ‘Any reason why suddenly, six months on, you’ve remembered a crucial fact that you didn’t mention when you were first questioned about this by the police immediately after the event?’
The jury, as twelve, craned themselves slightly towards Mrs Hussain. She shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Is it perhaps because you’ve been talking to others about this?’
‘No.’
It was as good as we were going to get from Mrs Hussain. Of course, she was never going to crumble under cross-examination, we all knew that, she wasn’t suddenly going to give evidence in a way that was helpful to us and our case. But I was pleased with Charlie – he had made the right points, and done so in a smooth and confident way. It was all I wanted in my Silk.
The next witness for the prosecution was Miss Lyra Adams. She was a young student nurse who, on the morning of Dickinson’s death, had just returned home after a night shift. She was nice and smiley and well-spoken and utterly credible on every point. She was a prosecutor’s dream witness and a nightmare for the defence. Thankfully, she hadn’t seen the incident, so her evidence could only go so far.
She knew Tasha by sight and had seen Dickinson on a few occasions but had never spoken to him. She also described hearing raised voices and slammed doors, and could remember a male voice saying, ‘You do this every fucking time, Tasha.’
She described the tone of the male voice as exasperated rather than angry. She also heard screaming and the sound of aggressive shouting coming from Tasha; she told the court that it was the screaming that made her come out of her flat. She then said that she could see Tasha sat against the wall sobbing. She cradled Tasha, who just repeated over and again, ‘He just fell.’
‘Which voice was the more aggressive, the female voice or the male voice?’ asked Fish.
And young student nurse Lyra Adams thought about it, and the jury watched her think about it, and I watched her, and Kelly watched her, and, no doubt, Tasha watched her.
Lyra said, after what seemed like an age, ‘It’s hard to say, the female sounded frantic, the male just sounded fed up.’
Charlie rightfully decided to get her out of the way as quickly as possible. He realised that there was little point in asking a very good witness too many questions – because nothing could be gained by that. He simply reminded her that she hadn’t actually seen these events, and therefore couldn’t help the jury as to whether this had been an act of aggression by Tasha Roux or an attempt to defend herself.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I agree with that, but,’ she added with the force of a knife being thrust between Tasha Roux’s shoulder blades, ‘it didn’t sound like the man was attacking her.’
Charlie now had to make a decision. Should he ask her how she had come to that conclusion and risk giving her the opportunity to expand on her answer, or should he just stop there and let her get on her way before she could do any more damage? I stared at the back of Charlie’s neck as I waited for him to ask the next question. I knew what I would have done; I knew that if I had been the one on
my feet, I would have said nothing more and sent her away, as far away from my case as possible. I wondered what Charlie would do. For a second he seemed to panic. For a second he turned a few pages in his notes, which was a giveaway sign that he had temporarily lost control. His head and face were turned downwards towards his notes rather than strong and straight towards the witness. This wasn’t good – this was a sign of weakness.
Then, thankfully, he recovered.
‘That, of course, Miss Adams, is supposition isn’t it, you don’t know for certain who was the aggressor as you weren’t watching the events, you were still listening to them. Is that fair?’
‘Yes,’ said the nice nurse, ‘that is fair.’
We adjourned for the day.
We traipsed back into the robing room. Joshua Benedict-Brown caught me up. I expected him to grin at me, make some kind of condescending remark, but, even worse, he tried to come over all pally. ‘We don’t want to get through this trial too fast,’ he said, ‘we’ll be doing ourselves out of money. We need to drag this into a third week at least.’
‘Yes,’ I said. But I didn’t want him to be all pally-chummy with me, I would rather he be horrible and superior, the whole experience would be easier if I could hate him.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing, old boy,’ he said in a slightly hushed and lascivious tone, ‘your instructing solicitor’s a bit of alright isn’t she?’
We both allowed our gaze to fall on Kelly Backworth who had just reached the robing room door about twenty feet in front of us, and was smiling at something that one of the ushers had said to her. I was in no mood for Benedict-Brown’s attempt at a bit of blokey banter, it was even worse than his attempt to endear himself to me.
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said, adding, ‘I’m far too busy concentrating on this case.’
Josh smiled at me and winked. ‘Of course you are.’
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 23