The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  Mr Owen Thomas: ‘I think Mr Zografos means you can do a great many exercises without equipment – though for me it would be too many.’ There was laughter in court, as the reporters say.

  VIOLENT THOUGHTS

  There had been surprisingly few language problems in the trial. The only interpreters who were continuously at work were the pair who whispered a running commentary to the two Frenchmen. But as the world shrinks and frontiers crumble, they and their colleagues are bound to be required in court more and more frequently. On my way out to lunch I checked what was going on elsewhere in the Old Bailey.

  These were some of the people appearing in court that day:

  Court 1:

  Nadeem Janjua, Mayur Divecha, Mifta Chodhury

  Court 5:

  Konstantine Korkolis, Athanasios Zografos, Jean-Marc Mereu, Djemel Moussaoui

  Court 6:

  Demitru Vadineanu

  Court 7:

  Mustafa Tunc

  Court 8:

  Serge Tarpinian

  Court 10:

  Malik Khan

  Court 14:

  Dele Ogboma

  Court 17:

  Anthony Zomparelli

  Court 18:

  Jerry Agyemang. Bail application for Ravi Ilangaraja.

  Even allowing for the List Office’s misspellings, it was striking that half the courts were dealing with people whose names, at any rate, were resoundingly foreign. Was this a trend? What did it tell us? Perhaps it was no more than a reflection of the internationalisation of any big modern city. After all, here was I heading off for lunch at a delicious dim sum restaurant which made the purlieus of St Paul’s Cathedral smell like Kowloon – and where the waiters were South African. Over the previous three and a half months my solitary lunch excursions had led me to Japanese sushi, Indian korma, Spanish tapas, Italian ravioli, salade Niçoise and Loch Fyne oysters, all within a half-mile radius of the Old Bailey – and the pub across the road was as Irish as potato cakes. Still, I found it interesting that when I looked in at Highgate Magistrates’ Court on a Monday morning early in 1998, three out of seven defendants needed an interpreter.

  I was digesting crispy Szechwan lamb when the Crown started cross-examining Zografos. Joanna Korner’s first ball was a bouncer: was it true that the prisoners had been able to discuss the case together in prison over Christmas? This was a question the jury had been burning to ask but which, as with a good many queries that we feared might stray into the mysterious zone marked ‘inadmissible evidence’, we had been too timid to write a note about. Yes, came the answer. So they would have been able to co-ordinate their story … That was certainly something to think about.

  We were now into the first week of March. The newspapers were excited by the news that the Labour Party wanted to hold child criminals responsible for their own evil-doing. This would be a vote-catcher among the jury-serving classes, I thought. There was not a lot of sympathy around for teenagers who terrorise housing estates and mug pensioners. For years the British middle classes have been in a funk about the tide of yobbishness supposedly swamping the country, egged on by stubble-chinned pop stars and the tabloid press. They would find an hour’s conversation in the jury restaurant at the Old Bailey quite reassuring.

  I told my juror friends what had happened to me the night before. I had been driving through Camden Town with my wife. It was around midnight. In a garage forecourt we suddenly saw what looked like a murder taking place: one man lay on the ground while another was beating him furiously over the head with an iron bar. I stopped and began hooting, hoping to scare the attacker off. Within seconds other cars had stopped too. A taxi manoeuvred to block the escape route. A man shouted that he had telephoned the police on his mobile. One motorist jumped out of his car and my wife joined him. They ran towards the two men.

  The iron bar turned out to be a length of rubber hose and the victim shaken but uninjured. It appeared to be a case of road rage. What interested me was that so many passers-by had been prepared to intervene. It was not the sort of good-citizen behaviour one is led to expect these days. Some people have equally low expectations of the jury system.

  With reference to violence, it struck me that one of the matters we would have to decide was whether Korkolis and the others were violent types. Would they have killed George? We had heard Miss Korner say to Zografos, ‘You were the man in the garage with the gun.’ And it was his fingerprint on the ammunition. She sounded a bit like a triumphant Cluedo-player. There was evidence of the syringes, with which they threatened to kill George by lethal injection. A younger juror reminded us that Mereu the wrestler worked as a security guard at rock concerts, a type pretty prone to get heavy. But were these guys a threat to the general public? Hard to tell but probably not, I reckoned.

  Magnus had heard from a friend who had been in the prison service that, were our defendants found guilty, they could be looking at up to seventeen years each. This led to some thoughtful talk of the kind juries are not supposed to bother their heads about. There was something uneasy-making about the idea that a kidnapper who had not actually hurt his victim physically might go to jail for longer than a violent rapist or mugger. Jurors are meant to concentrate on their verdicts, not speculate on sentences. But of course they do and they would scarcely be human if they did not. For neither the first nor last time, I wondered how we would all be feeling were ours a murder case and capital punishment still in force.

  The general view was that Judge Simon Goldstein would be a lenient sentencer.

  THE LAST WITNESS

  The judge reminded me more and more of Nigel Hawthorne as the sane version of George III. One day his patience was tried not by Korkolis but by counsel. Miss Korner was asking Zografos why he had remained silent after his arrest. Once he realised that George Fraghistas was helping the police, contrary to his undertaking, why hadn’t Zografos simply come clean about the plot?

  Because that was not the plan.

  But he had spoken to his solicitor, hadn’t he?

  At this point Mr Curran leapt to his feet. ‘My learned friend knows the rules. I don’t know what things are coming to,’ he expostulated, shaking his head in sorrow and astonishment.

  Joanna Korner jumped up. She had not broken the rules.

  Mr Curran jumped up. Yes she had.

  Hadn’t. Had. You rotter. Yaroo.

  What on earth was going on? We had no more idea of ‘the rules’ than of quantum mechanics. The judge took on the expression of a long-suffering schoolmaster and asked us to withdraw from this unedifying spectacle. ‘I have no idea what will happen next.’ No more did we, and things were no clearer when we were allowed back into court, though it was Mr Curran who got on his feet to be conciliatory. It was one of those occasions when I felt that the jury was being treated as a mere adjunct of the law, necessary idiots who could not be trusted with an explanation of the scene we had just witnessed.

  And something like it happened again. Miss Korner had sought to penetrate the shroud that surrounds a defendant’s dealings with his solicitor and seemed to have got away with it – though the significance of this achievement was entirely lost on the jury. Now she wished to scale the walls of the prisons where the defendants had been held. To begin with, we were told, they had all been incarcerated at Highdown in Surrey, though they were held in different blocks. ‘There was no communication. It was not a playground,’ Zografos asserted. But later, when they were moved to Belmarsh, they were able to meet and talk. Aha.

  Although the Crown had touched on this the day before, now the judge looked worried. ‘You know what I am concerned about,’ he said meaningfully, which was irritating: he must have known the jury had not the foggiest notion what he was concerned about. He was ostentatiously addressing counsel over our heads in his not-in-front-of-the-children manner. So out we had to go again, speculating madly and feeling rather betrayed by His Lordship, on whom we relied to treat us like grown-ups.

  My advice to the judiciary is n
ever to leave conundrums hanging in the air like this: all sorts of mischief might ensue. We cooked up a bit of mischief, though I am not saying that the one thing led to the other. Postman Bob had been agitating for some time about wanting to see whether it really was possible to get two men into the boot of a Rover 416. My own killjoy view was that this would be a waste of time, since I was sure it was possible, recollecting 1960s happenings in which improbable numbers of people had crammed into Minis. Eventually, we agreed to send a note asking merely if we could look at the car.

  Why of course, said the judge when he had read our note. He would even try to get us the kidnap car itself, provided it was not sitting in an auctioneer’s warehouse by now. We would be able to hold an inspection first thing on Tuesday morning.

  Day 57 – Heinz Day, said Magnus waggishly. Today’s pastimes included Kate reading out passages from a book called Weird Sex; Sophie saying, ‘Hey, if Korkolis had planned his kidnap a bit later he’d have got his second Orange phone for free,’ and Magnus producing the first of the day’s jokes: A girl went to a fancy-dress party all in black with a red feather in her hair. ‘I’m a dying ember,’ she explained. ‘And if someone doesn’t give me a quick poke I’m off home.’

  This was the day we were to look at a – or maybe even the – Rover 416. We assembled in court. The usher said, ‘Silence, please,’ and took the special oath required for juries going on walkabout: ‘I will well and truly keep this jury as directed by the court …’

  Unfortunately, while we were gathering to set off on our inspection someone made a lighthearted suggestion that two of us might seize the chance to leap into the car boot. The usher scuttled off and, unbeknownst to us, told the judge. We waited for nearly an hour, wondering what was going on. Eventually, the judge called us back into court. With excessive courtesy he thanked us for alerting him to what we had in mind. Not only were he and counsel agreed that we could not stage a reconstruction to determine whether a Greek shipping agent and a French Olympic wrestler could fit in the boot of a Rover; he had now decided we should not even see the car.

  This was very deflating. We felt we had been misunderstood and unfairly reprimanded. It had been a joke …

  Mr Curran called a witness from the gaming demi-monde, a casino manager from the Ritz. He did not help Zografos’s case. True, he produced records of the astonishing sums George had laid out at the tables. Between 1992 and 1995 his ‘drop’ at just this one club had been a cool £5,632,600. That sum represented what he had staked, of course, not his net losses. But who could question that risking such sums might bankrupt a man and drive him to desperate measures? However, the manager rather spoilt the effect from the defence’s point of view by explaining that although George’s cheques had occasionally bounced, they were usually honoured within a few days. What is more, he added, Mr George Fraghistas would still be a welcome guest at the Ritz. I should think so, too, spending that kind of money.

  Zografos’s case was wound up at midday. Now the question was: would Moussaoui and Mereu take the stand? They would not.

  Until recently, the jury would have been instructed not to draw adverse conclusions about their refusal either to talk to the police after their arrest or testify in court. Under present law, however, the judge was obliged to go through the rigmarole of informing the jury that it might draw what inferences it wished from their silence. Frankly, I cannot think many juries need reminding of what they would do quite naturally anyway. But this was what the great row about the Tories’ ‘abolition’ of the right to silence amounted to, so naturally I paid close attention as each of the defence counsel in turn formally acknowledged the judge’s words. We could infer away to our hearts’ content.

  It was a slight shock to realise that we had now come to the end of the evidence in this case. No new witnesses would be brought before us, no new facts that might illuminate or confuse the issues any further. All the pieces of the gigantic jigsaw had been laid out. Now it was up to Miss Korner, Mr Korkolis and the other three barristers to try to persuade us how to assemble it. Miss Korner had had her hair done for the big day. She would shortly begin her closing speech.

  BARRISTERS

  I have never been anywhere that made me feel as class-conscious as the Old Bailey. The place itself has a lot to do with it. It is as though a gentleman’s club had amalgamated with a police station. The rough and the smooth mingle in awkward proximity. Crudely speaking, judges and barristers are toffs, whereas almost everyone else is a prole. That is not literally true. There are scores of QCs who never went near a public school and speak in all manner of accents. Our own judge had come up the hard way from humble beginnings. But that is how it will strike the eye of a novice juryman at the Central Criminal Court, be his own blood never so blue.

  It is partly the air of self-assurance with which the barristers saunter round the place, as though they were the guardians of mysteries unfathomable to the rest of us. This of course is exactly what they are: members of a powerful and secretive profession with its own language and arcane rules.

  It is partly the subfusc uniform, with its touches of starchy white – as forbidding as a Grand Inquisitor’s yet understatedly glamorous, especially as worn by one dandyish woman barrister who favoured pin-striped trousers. Jurors, solicitors, interpreters, witnesses are mere starlings beside these glossy magpies.

  It is partly the way they drawl and peer condescendingly over the tops of their specs and write their notes with fat black Parker fountain pens. It is the unavoidable arrogance that comes of being licensed to interrogate strangers about their most private affairs and call them liars to their faces. ‘Of course this is all nonsense, isn’t it?’ they will say. ‘The truth is, and you know it, that it was you who blah blah blah blah … Didn’t you?’

  If the barristers are the officer class and the judges are the generals, the policemen, ushers and other court officials are the NCOs, deferential to those above them, bossy to those below. While we of course, the jurors, defendants, and most of those who appear in the witness box, are the poor bloody infantry: kept waiting, chivvied, expected to obey orders and hold our tongues. I once had the temerity to address Mr Curran directly regarding some documents he had said the jury were to have. We were in court, but the judge had risen and general chitchat had broken out. ‘Mr Curran,’ I said, ‘Mr Curran.’ He was only about five feet away. He looked at me aghast, as though I were threatening him with a hand grenade, then turned to the usher: ‘Is that juror trying to speak to me?’ It was a moment worthy of a Bateman cartoon. The usher looked mortified that one of his flock had bleated out of turn and shooed us from the court.

  So although these highly educated, highly paid men and women may not actually be toffs, that is how they behave; and although juries are not drawn exclusively from the hoi polloi, that is how they are treated. I imagine most barristers give barely a thought to this immense divide between Them and Us. It probably does not matter a great deal anyway. To the first-time juryman or witness, the majesty of the law is pretty majestic whether the attorneys are in wigs and waistcoats in the Old Bailey or schmoozing an American courtroom in a button-down shirt and loafers.

  But there is this danger, I imagine: that the average juror in this country will feel he has a great deal more in common with the average defendant than he does with the average barrister and m’learned friends (who, by the way, really do seem to be his friends, which must alarm the prisoner in the dock just as it intrigues the jurors: the minute the judge has risen, there they all are, prosecutors and defenders, chuckling conspiratorially and calling each other by first names).

  There is no way of knowing whether fellow-feeling for the accused and resentment towards the accuser ever do sway a jury’s verdict. But it is hard to believe they have no influence. Put it this way: it would have been easier to imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting on an Old Bailey jury than to picture any of the counsel in Court 5 being comfortable in that role.

  Inevitably, however, when it co
mes to doing what they are primarily there for, barristers must communicate with ordinary mortals. They must curb their erudition and tailor their eloquence to their audience: Them must talk to Us. This is one of the strongest reasons for supporting the jury system. It ensures that the defendant understands what is going on. He is judged according to arguments and in language both he and the jury can follow.

  That is the theory. In practice, of course, a barrister could talk in baby language and still leave his listeners perplexed. The adversarial procedure has many virtues, chiefly that of giving the defence the widest scope for making its case. Its drawback is that by more or less forcing counsel to take extreme positions and magnify every conflict of evidence, it can make it hard to judge the truth. One side says black, the other white. Not surprisingly, the outcome in the juror’s mind is often a throbbing grey.

  In Members of the Jury (Wildwood House, 1976), a collection of jurors’ experiences edited by Dulan Barber and Giles Gordon, one contributor, Jeremy Brooks, put it like this:

  The fog which obscures the minds of a large proportion of the general public is not sufficiently allowed for … They rely on Authority to tell them what to think, and when two representatives of Authority, wearing identical wigs and gowns and speaking with equal certainty, tell them to think two utterly opposed things, their minds, unable to cope with the conflict, simply shut up shop for the day.

  The fog cannot be as impenetrable or the shop so quick to bring its shutters down as Mr Brooks believes, otherwise we would have hung juries every week. The problems are slightly different. The first is that jurors must face the fact that not all these grandees in their court finery can be telling the truth. The public is dimly aware that defence barristers are merely mouthpieces for their clients and that their job is to present not The Truth, but the truth as those clients relate it. Even so, it is a sophisticated concept. There is not a lawyer in the land who has not been asked how he or she can take on a case if they believe in their hearts that the defendant is guilty. There cannot be one who has not replied that it is a fundamental right to have one’s defence put forward as professionally as possible, so long as one insists that it is true. Yet this corner-stone of British legal practice is never explained to juries, so far as I know. Maybe it would be helpful if it were.