Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

The judge took a drink of water.

‘Secondly, let me turn to the attempted murder charge. There is agreement between the prosecution and defence concerning the fact that the defendant drove a white Ford Transit van from London to Banbury. Even though he initially denied the fact to the police, and you may apply whatever weight to that denial as you may decide, he now admits that he was the driver of the van and he was in the vicinity of the crash in which Mr Gordon-Russell was seriously injured. You don’t have to worry about whether that bit is true. It is. What is in dispute is whether he was the cause of the crash. If you think that the defendant’s account may be true and that he did not crash into the car, and that he damaged the van later by striking a concrete post in Harrow, then you should find him not guilty.’

There was a hefty degree of scepticism in his tone.

‘However, if you believe the prosecution’s claim that he was responsible for the crash and that the white paint found on the rear of Mr Gordon-Russell’s car was from the van that the defendant was driving, and you are sure, not only that the defendant did purposely crash into the car, but also that he did so in an attempt, not just to injure Mr Gordon-Russell but to kill him, then you should find him guilty of attempted murder.

‘Now let us turn to the murder itself. The prosecution have told you that the defendant had both the opportunity and the motive to have carried out this murder. It has been established by a forensic expert that the defendant’s DNA was present on the victim’s neck and on the dog lead used to strangle her. This is not contested by the defence. What is in contention is whether Mrs Gordon-Russell was alive or dead when the defendant arrived at her house. If you think that the defendant may be telling the truth that she was already dead when he arrived and that someone else was responsible, then you should find him not guilty. If, however, you believe that the defendant is lying and you are sure that he did, in fact, break in and strangle Mrs Gordon-Russell, then you should find him guilty of murder.

‘Now, members of the jury,’ went on the judge, ‘you will retire to consider your verdicts. You should elect a foreman from your number who will act as a conduit for your discussion and your spokesperson, but be aware that each of you has an equal voice and your deliberations should be as a complete jury of twelve. Do not split up into smaller groups, or discuss matters when some of you are not present. By a process of discussion of the evidence, the group of twelve of you must decide, after applying the law as I have directed you, whether your verdict should be guilty or not guilty on each count, and it should be the verdict of you all. You may have heard of something called a majority verdict, but that does not apply in this case. If, at some time in the future, it does become relevant, then I will give you the necessary direction in the law. Until that time, I require a unanimous decision.’

The usher then led the jury out of the court.

I watched them go, trying but failing to read what was going on in their minds. One or two of them glanced across at Joe sitting in the dock behind the glass but, even then, I found it impossible to discern if they were pro or anti.

Now it was up to them.

What had Douglas said? In my experience, juries are always a bit of a lottery .

My own profession was all about measuring chance and calculating probability, but still I had little or no idea what would happen.

Would the jury believe Joe or not? He had certainly been resolute and unwavering about finding Amelia already dead. And I had to admit he’d been fairly convincing on that point, even if his hitting-the-concrete-post-with-the-van story had been far more suspect.

All we could do was wait for the jury to decide.

Now where was my money?

And wait we did. For hours. No ‘seventeen or twenty-seven minutes of deliberation’ in this murder trial.

‘Is it a good sign or a bad one?’ I asked DS Dowdeswell.

‘You never can tell,’ he replied unhelpfully. ‘Juries are a law unto themselves. But if they’re spending the time reading through all those nasty emails, it might be a good one.’

We waited.

And then we waited some more.

‘I wonder what they’re saying in there,’ I said absentmindedly.

‘We will never know,’ said the detective. ‘Unlike in the United States where jurors are interviewed on television after high-profile cases, and some of them even write books about their jury deliberations, here they are not allowed to speak about it — not then, not ever.’

We went on waiting.

At the end of the day the judge had the jury brought back into court.

‘Members of the jury,’ he said. ‘I am going to send you home now for the night. You will reconvene here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock to continue your deliberations. Please take note, you must not discuss the case with anyone else, not anyone else at all, and that includes your family. Nor are you at liberty to discuss it between yourselves unless all twelve of you are together in the jury room. And, as I have told you before, you must not seek to discover any details of this case in the newspapers, on the television or radio, or via the internet or social media. To do any of those things would be to hold this court in contempt and may make you subject to imprisonment.’

And, with that dire warning still ringing in their ears, the twelve trooped out of the court.

As on most nights during the trial, I went home by taxi to the Old Forge.

This waiting and not knowing was interminable torture but, if it was bad for me, it must be so much worse for Joe. I almost felt sorry for him, but only almost. He had brought all of this on himself. I just hoped that the jury could see through his lies and protestations.

I kicked my heels around the house all evening and wondered if I would still be living here a year from now. My love for the place had evaporated on that October morning, and it had never returned.

Maybe I’d move back to London.

A new home? A new job? A new life?

Same old heartache.

I tried to watch some television but I was too nervous to concentrate. I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. By the early hours, when I finally dozed off, I had convinced myself that the jury would find him innocent.

What would I do then?

By lunchtime of the second day of jury deliberation, I was almost climbing the walls with tension, fear and frustration, at least I would have been if my legs had been working correctly. As it was, I couldn’t even pace up and down properly to rid myself of the nervous energy.

Why was the jury taking so long? What were they doing in there?

Midway through the afternoon, the judge called them back into court to ask how things were going and whether it was likely that they would be able to reach a decision on which they were all agreed.

The foreman stood up. He was the man who had been in shorts and flip-flops for much of the trial but now was wearing a sober shirt and trousers, maybe in deference to his position. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think we may be able to reach verdicts if given a little more time.’

So the judge sent them back to the jury room.

And his intervention must have galvanised their thinking because, less than an hour later, word came through that the jury were ready with their verdicts.

I wasn’t.

My heart was beating nineteen to the dozen and, as I took my seat in the court, I could hardly breathe.

Everyone took their allotted places and, when all were ready, the jury were brought in.

Douglas had told me that he reckoned he could always tell if the jury were going to give a ‘not guilty’ verdict. ‘They will look at the defendant,’ he’d said. ‘If it’s guilty they tend to keep their eyes down.’