The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  For all his academic thoroughness and quickness with statistics, I had the impression that Michael Zander remains a defender of the jury system for reasons that Louis Blom-Cooper would find sentimental. One of the Runciman Commission’s recommendations was that more research on juries should be allowed. Professor Zander supported the idea in principle, but was still slightly worried by it. There were two dangers in finding out too much about how juries actually go about their task. One, it would give opponents a useful stick. Two, it would threaten the mystique. Perhaps these were not the most appropriate sentiments for a cool-headed Professor of Law. But this made his candour all the more telling.

  POLICE EVIDENCE

  Some months after our trial I got the go-ahead to talk to the three key Scotland Yard men involved in the Korkolis case: DCI Laurie Vanner, DS Martin Hawkins, and DC Ian Slade. We met at a former police station in Aldgate which I had a little trouble finding. It was a dingy 1960s block with an abandoned air, looking more like a derelict polytechnic college than a nerve centre of criminal investigation. Traffic wardens had moved in on the ground floor while the Organised Crime Group had offices upstairs. Someone had punched a ragged hole in the plywood wall of the reception area.

  DCI Vanner is a tall, trim man approaching 50. He had been twenty-nine years in the police force and was with the Organised Crime Group from its foundation. He specialised in kidnapping and sieges, and had long experience of hostage negotiations. He spent weeks every year scooting around the globe sharing his expertise with overseas police forces – advising, lecturing and sometimes in the thick of action.

  DS Martin Hawkins is another peripatetic policeman. He arrived late at our meeting wearing lightweight clothes, having just flown in from Germany. Before that he had been in St Lucia. Forty-seven years old, he had been with the Met since 1971. After long experience on murder squads, he moved across to hostage-takings and kidnaps. He and Laurie Vanner had worked together before, and were both involved in a guerrilla siege in Sierra Leone not long before the 1997 rebellion. (Evidently the Yard is a valuable invisible exporter – more invisible than most.)

  DC Ian Slade was Martin Hawkins’ chief lieutenant on the Korkolis case. He was 35 and had been in the Met for seventeen years, the last two of them with the OCG; before that on murder squads around London. An impressive young man with Gary Lineker looks, he struck me as an obvious high flyer.

  I formed the impression that these three were admirable policemen: thoughtful, highly skilled and enormously dedicated. No wonder the Fraghistas family felt they were in good hands. When I interviewed George Fraghistas after the trial he was bursting with admiration for his rescuers. ‘People have an image of the police as a stereotype. I got a culture shock. I realised they were no different from you and me.’ He told the Guardian’s Duncan Campbell: ‘They love their job. When they released me you’d have thought they had just had sex – they were smiling, they were so happy they had succeeded.’

  Of course, as Helena Kennedy says, ‘At the serious end of crime you get used to a very sophisticated form of policing … you are getting the crack end of the police service.’ These men seemed to bear that out. Martin Hawkins demonstrated a small but telling example of their professionalism when he said that, although they had felt a warm affection for the Fraghistas family, he had had to warn George that their relationship before and during the trial would have to be strictly arm’s-length. When he was in Athens to pursue his investigations he took care that he always met George in the office, never at any of the family’s homes.

  (It is a minor irony that expertise actually misled DS Hawkins the night he burst into Hogan Mews. He ran upstairs first, because ‘in all my experience kidnappers always hold their victims in an upstairs bedroom’. Had there been someone with a gun at George’s head downstairs in the kitchen, that could have been a fatal error.)

  DCI Vanner and his colleagues talked animatedly about the jury system, while making it clear that these were their personal views and did not necessarily reflect the official line. Generally speaking, the police do not love juries, though they know perfectly well they must live with them. It is easy enough to understand their scepticism. Most of Laurie Vanner’s early service was in south London.‘I saw an awful lot of trials as a divisional detective,’ he said. ‘Defence lawyers always worked on the basis that it was best to opt for jury trial – even if you’d just got caught with your hand in the till. The villains always said go for a jury trial. Snaresbrook Crown Court used to be famous – infamous – for acquittals. It was because of the jury catchment area.’ (In the early 1990s, figures from the Lord Chancellor’s department showed a 29 per cent acquittal rate at Snaresbrook, compared with 16 per cent nationally.) Now all that had changed, he added: catchment areas have been made much more diffuse.

  He told the story of a case back in the 1980s. A gang of skinheads were accused of beating up some black boys, one of whom was appallingly injured. ‘The evidence against them was overwhelming.’ But after a month’s trial, they were acquitted. Some time later a juror wrote to Laurie Vanner saying that the verdict had been clear from day one: four of the jurors were either friends of the accused or actually related to them.

  Nobbling still happens now and then, the detectives said, even though the introduction of majority verdicts thirty years ago made it pretty ineffectual. In organised crime cases, families and friends regularly sit in the public gallery to see if they can identify a juror, who can then be leaned on. ‘They can follow him home, threaten him or bribe him,’ said Laurie Vanner. ‘Just staring hard at a juror can be deeply disconcerting.’ Usually they pick on the person they think has the strongest personality and is most likely to sway the others. Old Bailey jurors are better protected than some against this sort of thing as the juries are drawn from a hugely dispersed area.

  Martin Hawkins said that a major fault in the layout of most courts is that the public can get a good look at the jury, which they cannot in Court 2 at the Old Bailey. ‘Juries should be hidden,’ he said. ‘And jurors’ names should not be disclosed. They should be referred to by their numbers.’ (This has happened on occasion, though of course it virtually rules out a challenge ‘for cause’.)

  Every detective spends a good deal of his or her career in court, observing juries at close quarters. If there was a single strong criticism emerging from our conversation it was that juries were not always up to the job. As Martin Hawkins put it, ‘Juries should be more balanced with professional people. They are not representative. There are too many people who get off doing jury service too easily.’ There should be more jurors with brains and qualifications and different experiences of life. ‘Then I think you would get a fair selection of the community. That is not what’s happening.’

  ‘Our perception of juries, especially in long cases, is that the good guys go,’ said Ian Slade, echoing the view widely shared among the chattering (and jury-avoiding) classes. He proposed a simple device for making it harder for people to get off: they should be allowed as far as possible to pick their own preferred fortnight in which to serve. Potential jurors would be told that they would have to do their duty some time in the next twelve months but could choose when to do it. Once the dates had been confirmed, there would be no excuse for failing to be available, except in cases of real hardship. This seemed to me a first-rate idea.

  Despite the drawbacks, Laurie Vanner and his colleagues felt that in major cases, juries could be relied on to behave responsibly. There was a common appreciation of the seriousness of murder, rape and so forth. But in minor cases, tribal loyalties could take over. ‘So what if he nicked a few quid?’ jurors might be inclined to say. ‘There but for the grace of God, etc’ (Paul Johnson made the same point in a Daily Mail article in February 1997, observing that juries in such cases were often frivolous or bloody-minded.) As for complex cases, there was a notable tendency for jurors to ‘shut off. Even those taking notes would stop doing so – and incidentally, why didn’t judges insist that all juro
rs make the effort to take notes?

  DS Hawkins said he thought fraud trials should be heard by specially able jurors – accountants, for example. But then, even as he was speaking, he admitted that he had always been against having police fraud squads manned by specialists. If an ordinary policeman couldn’t understand what was afoot, he had argued, how would the court?

  I said I had the impression that most jurors were able to rise to the occasion of a trial. Martin Hawkins agreed, but made a point that had not occurred to me. He said he wondered whether, when it came to ordinary people who had never taken a big decision in their lives before, the feeling of power might not go to their heads. It might make them behave irrationally. ‘You take them out of their natural environment, put them in a position of authority…’ There might be a strong temptation to put one over on the establishment, by disbelieving the police, for example. After a few jury experiences the juror would recognise that calling police evidence into question is a routine defence gambit. ‘But not many get the chance to learn that.’

  DCI Vanner had left by now and it was lunchtime. I took detectives Hawkins and Slade to the next-door pub for a drink. Ian Slade was already involved in another case. Martin Hawkins was investigating war criminals. They seemed cheerfully undismayed by the knowledge that, however hard they worked on their new tasks, however strong their evidence, the ultimate judgement on their toils would come not from a judge or their own superiors but from twelve ordinary, unqualified, randomly selected members of the public. How many of us could bear to operate under such conditions?

  In January 1998 Laurie Vanner, Martin Hawkins, Ian Slade, Graham Clemence and Don King were all awarded Commissioner’s Commendations for their initiative and bravery in solving the Fraghistas kidnap case.

  THE VICTIM’S VIEW

  I called on George Fraghistas at his brother’s flat in Maida Vale on a rainy day in June. He was looking healthier than he had in court, crisply dressed in a green shirt and slacks. He seemed to be pleased that he was putting on weight again, after losing 20 lbs during the kidnap and more during the trial. We drank coffee and ate ginger nuts while he talked about the police.

  He said to me, ‘You would have thought they would be tough and arrogant. But they were so kind. They gave us a hell of a lot of support after it was all over. Real concern. They kept calling me to ask how I was, if I wanted to see an expert at the Maudsley Hospital. It has a unit which specialises in helping kidnap victims and hostages.’

  But he preferred to get over his ordeal by himself. He did not want that sort of help. Instead he devised a more positive form of therapy. Early in the summer he threw a dinner for every single policeman and policewoman who had been involved in the operation. He and his mother and the rest of his family, including six of his seven nephews and nieces flown in from Athens, hosted a great feast at The Belfry, London’s most exclusive dining club. Some thirty-odd coppers, from the DCI to the most junior PC, sat down to Anton Mosimann’s famous food and had a memorable evening. According to Laurie Vanner and his team, no one in living memory had ever given the police such a generous thank-you for doing their duty.

  It was harder for George to be dispassionate about what he had gone through in the witness box. Under our adversarial system the court had allowed the victim of a violent kidnap to be treated as though he were a blackmailer, a liar and a heartless traitor to his own family. ‘The worst time was the trial,’ he said ruefully. ‘The cupboard was extremely nasty – imagine being in the dark for nine days. But it was like a mugging. I can live with it. What it was impossible to get used to, and was extremely hurtful, was eleven days in the witness box being insulted in this vulgar and barbaric way. That was the bad part. One of the defence counsel said “You are a cheat with a T and cheap with a P.” That was much worse than being in the cupboard.’

  It was almost as lonely, too. ‘The police repeatedly told me and my family we should not talk about the case before the others had given evidence. It was very difficult. We all became paranoiac about it, to the extent that I couldn’t speak to my mother at all. Everybody in Greece said we were stupid. They thought we should have sat down and talked about it. But we took it seriously. I know it showed, because it would have been obvious if we had all talked among ourselves.’

  He was right about that. I remembered being struck by how plain it was that the family witnesses had not co-ordinated their stories. That is the sort of thing an alert jury picks up quite quickly. So what had he thought about the jury? Were we alert? What had he made of our role in his courtroom ordeal?

  ‘I must say that it is a very good system,’ he answered. ‘In order to be able to judge a system you must test it to extremes.’ Whether he intended to compliment us for sorting out an extremely complicated case or meant that it was an extremely close-run thing, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘During the trial I got very scared,’ he said. ‘You see someone hammering the same point over and over again … Everything depends on twelve people you have never met before, whose background you don’t know, whose mental capacity you don’t know: you don’t know the experiences they have had in the past. The outcome is based on what these twelve people are going to think. God knows, it is extremely frustrating. The defence would not let me stay in court in case I put psychological pressure on the jury.’

  He could not make out which way the jury’s sympathies were going. Our faces were like stone, he said. Every now and then he would see one of us apparently fast asleep. The uncertainty became even more acute while the jury was deliberating. Martin Hawkins had become concerned when we went into a second day. The Crown had begun to worry about a hung jury. Poor George had comforted himself with the thought that, if indeed we failed to reach a verdict and there was a re-trial, he would at least know the defence case inside out.

  I was rather pleased to learn that we had been so inscrutable. Not even that high-rolling gambler George Fraghistas had had a feel for which way the dice were falling.

  THE VICTIM’S MOTHER

  Mrs Rhea Fraghistas looked round her small, pretty flat and laughed. She was telling me how every day during her son’s kidnap the little living room we were sitting in had been crammed with policemen. With Nicos and Marily there as well, it had been a fearful squash. An officer had slept there every night, on the pink sofa under the window which looked out over Rotten Row.

  ‘The jury? I was scared stiff. Not at the beginning of the trial. But when I heard all those lies being told. I never knew lawyers could tell so many lies – though one of the Crown Prosecution Service girls told me that if they take off their wigs and their robes they’re lovely people.’ She snorted delicately.

  ‘The jury had such blank faces. I hoped there would be a few learned people among you, who could make the others understand. Because it was a very difficult case. The prosecution was blind about what the defence would be. If only you had known he was a crook, which you could not know…

  ‘If I had been on the jury I would have been confused too. All I hoped was that the jurors would see the truth. This was my prayer.’

  THE COURT OFFICIALS

  The usher and the clerk looked oddly out of context sitting in a corner of the Old London pub on Ludgate Hill with drinks in front of them and no gowns. It was like meeting one’s tour guides back in England after returning from a package holiday. It was a Friday evening in early July. We greeted each other as old friends.

  Roy became an usher because he had so enjoyed a stint as a juror at Middlesex Crown Court. He was nearing 50 and had been a butcher all his working life until then. There was no difficulty about this mid-life career change: he simply went along to the Job Centre. He had been at the Old Bailey for four years and loved the place.

  Sarah joined the court service as an administrative officer when she was just 16. Born and brought up near Glasgow, she had worked at seven different courts in England and was now a Higher Executive Officer, which meant regular spells as a clerk of the court. One of her tasks as clerk w
as to ensure that her court sat for at least four and a half hours a day in order to justify the running costs – approximately £7,500 per diem. She preferred long cases because everyone involved, including the jury, could develop a rapport. Our trial pleased her greatly on that score.

  Roy and Sarah had watched hundreds of juries at close quarters and on the whole thought highly of them. ‘You can’t beat having twelve ordinary, utterly different people taking the decision,’ said Roy. ‘It is the most unlikely thing, but it is the fairest. I think that, even though I have seen dozens of weird verdicts. People say it’s better that ten guilty men go free than that an innocent man should suffer. That was certainly true when there was capital punishment’ – which there was, of course, when Blackstone made that famous remark.

  Apparently a lot of jurors get so hooked that they ask if they can do it again. But Roy thought the ideal juror was a first-time innocent. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing in the jury box, he said. He would disqualify himself as a juror now, having seen what he’d seen: he would be too cynical.

  Sarah bore him out. She had often seen jurors looking absolutely stunned when, having found a defendant guilty on a minor count but not on the graver one, they then heard his appalling antecedents read out by the Crown. That was enough to harden anyone’s heart next time they heard a barrister put the case for the defence. She had seen a few men she thought innocent found guilty, especially of rape. But she had also seen obviously guilty men acquitted.

  Sarah said she made a point of smiling at jurors to put them at their ease, which she thought was important. ‘If a juror loses it in the first few days, he loses it for keeps.’ Roy agreed: ‘I’ve seen a juror physically shaking with nerves at the responsibility of it all.’ But on the whole, juries were hard-working, good-tempered and well-behaved, they thought. You did get the occasional pain in the neck, said Roy, but it was rare – and he had never had a mutiny. He did once have a gruff-voiced transvestite on a jury; but he/she was an excellent juror and was only discovered because of an outbreak of afternoon stubble.