Daily Mail online

By DM reporter

31st March 2010

 

Four found guilty of £1.75m Heathrow heist after unprecedented trial without jury (which cost taxpayer £25m)

 

Four armed robbers were today jailed for a total of 64 years after being found guilty by a judge in a historic trial – the first to be heard without a jury.

John Twomey, Peter Blake, Barry Hibberd and Glenn Cameron were convicted at the Old Bailey of charges relating to a £1.75 million heist at a Heathrow warehouse in February 2004.

Twomey was jailed for 20 years and six months, Blake for 10 years and nine months while Cameron was given a 15-year sentence. Hibberd was jailed for 17 years and six months.

 

 

Guilty: John Twomey (left) and Glen Cameron were convicted of taking part in the £1.75 million Heathrow heist

 

 

No jury: Barry Hibberd (left) and Peter Blake were also found guilty in a trial which made legal history

Tattooed Twomey  – who is likely to die in jail – wiped away tears and waved to a woman who wept in the public gallery as he was taken down to begin his sentence.

New laws meant the trial could be heard by a judge alone after the Court of Appeal ruled there was a serious danger that a jury could be nobbled.

It was the first serious criminal trial to be held without a jury in England and Wales in 400 years. There had been three previous abortive attempts to try the case, lasting up to six months at a time.

The total cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be at least £25 million – more than 14 times the amount stolen.

 

 

JURY NOBBLING EVIDENCE KEPT SECRET

Secret evidence of alleged jury nobbling was kept from the public and defence lawyers in the Heathrow warehouse robbery trial because of what senior prosecutors said was its ‘sensitivity’.

They argued it would be ‘inappropriate’ to release the information, saying: "There are risks involved.’

Lawyers said they were unable even to confirm whether there would be any prosecution of those said to be involved in the alleged interference.

The material was considered so prejudicial to the defendants that the judge in charge of returning verdicts in the latest trial was not allowed to see it.

But there were other reasons why it was kept secret – under a ‘public interest immunity’ provision – since it will remain so even now the trial has ended.

Simon Russell Flint QC, prosecuting, said: ‘Material relating to the jury tampering will not be disclosed now or in the future.’

A few details about what is alleged were made public in court.

At the end of the third trial at the Old Bailey, Judge Jeremy Roberts said: ‘Solid information came to my attention that an attempt has been made to nobble more than one of the jurors on this jury.’

A Court of Appeal ruling on the case referred to evidence ‘that approaches were being made to two members of the jury’ and that Judge Roberts said he had seen ‘highly prejudicial material’ about it.

Lord Judge, sitting with two other judges, heard secret evidence from an assistant commissioner and a detective superintendent of the Met when deciding on the application to hold the trial without a jury.

They ruled: ‘The danger of jury tampering and the subversion of the process of trial by jury is very significant.’

John Twomey and Peter Blake both protested they had not been involved in any nobbling when they gave evidence in the latest proceedings.

 

 

 

Today, at the end of the fourth trial, Mr Justice Treacy passed guilty verdicts on Twomey, 62, of New Milton, Hampshire; Blake, 57, of Notting Hill, west London; Hibberd, 43, of Shepherds Bush, west London; and Cameron, 50, of New Milton, Hampshire.

At the start of the historic hearing, the clerk asked Mr Justice Treacy if he had reached verdicts.

The judge replied: ‘Yes, I have and I wish to deliver them now. The defendants may remain seated.’

He went on to deliver the verdicts, giving his reasons on each count and each defendant.

The judge said: ‘I have in every case considered the counts individually and the position of each defendant on each count separately.’

He said the armed robbery was ‘professionally planned and professionally executed’.

Mr Justice Treacy has considered his verdicts for a week-and-a-half.

The decision to hold the trial without a jury was still causing controversy at the Old Bailey with a senior defence barrister describing it as a ‘disgrace’.

The ‘hallowed principle’ of trial by jury was set aside by the Court of Appeal in June last year, in the first case using powers under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, but campaigners called the decision ‘a dangerous precedent’.

Evidence seen by appeal judges of alleged jury tampering was kept from the public and defence lawyers because of what senior prosecutors described as the ‘sensitivity’ of the information.

Mr Justice Treacy began the latest trial in January and heard all the evidence and legal submissions in just over two months.

The case had been beset by problems including a botched police surveillance operation, one of the defendants absconding while on bail and the decision by a judge not to take guilty verdicts from a jury in the second trial three years ago.

Even the robbers had some bad luck, mistakenly believing they were going to steal £10 million thanks to a misread cargo manifest. They got away with just a fraction of that but it has never been recovered.

This was despite the fact that police mounted surveillance after receiving intelligence in July 2003 that a raid on the Menzies World Cargo warehouse was being planned.

Twomey, Blake and Hibberd, described in court as ‘experienced career criminals’, carried out the raid with Twomey’s brother-in-law Cameron, and two other men who have yet to be brought to justice.

All four defendants were found guilty today of robbery and having a firearm with intent to commit robbery.

Blake was also found guilty of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life.

Hibberd was found not guilty of 13 charges on unrelated firearms offences concerning a cache of weapons at a lock-up garage in Uxbridge, west London.

The court heard that all the robbers were masked and wore high-visibility jackets and dark woollen hats during the Friday night raid, planned with the help of insider Darren Brockwell, who later turned supergrass and gave evidence.

Five of the robbers were armed with handguns and a sixth carried a Heckler & Koch 9mm firearm similar to those used by police.

Three of the suspects can be seen leaving the Menzies warehouse after the robbery: One of them is carrying a holdall containing cash

Getaway: The suspects were caught on CCTV leaving the vault. By now their faces are clearly visible

Caught in the act: Hibberd, Cameron and Twomey were also picked up by CCTV cameras at a hotel after the robbery

During the hold-up 16 members of staff were tied up and threatened while one, David Westwood, was shot at by Blake as he tried to escape and raise the alarm.

Robbers took £1.05 million in sterling and the rest of the cash in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Australian currency, some of it exchanged at foreign exchange bureaux in central London in the following weeks.

The raid was described by Simon Russell Flint QC, prosecuting, as a ‘professionally-planned and professionally-executed armed robbery’.

Judge Jeremy Roberts presided over the first three trials at the Old Bailey, beginning in March 2005 when Twomey was in the dock alongside a number of other men, who cannot be named. But he was taken ill and could not continue.

A second trial started in March 2007, when Twomey faced charges alongside Blake and Hibberd, who had been arrested since the start of the first trial.

 

Verdicts: Mr Justice Treacy made history by presiding over the trial without jury

But by the time the jury retired in August they were down to 10 members – although they soon sent a note indicating they had reached ‘on all defendants on all counts, a very strong majority decision’.

The judge indicated to defence barristers that the verdicts were likely to be adverse to them.

It was just before a bank holiday weekend and the judge decided it would not be appropriate to give them a majority direction at that stage.

It was a decision that would cost taxpayers millions of pounds, as one member of the panel refused to return after the weekend, saying he was too stressed.

Reduced to nine members, the jury would now only be able to reach unanimous verdicts, but were unable to agree, leading to their discharge and a third trial.

That began in June 2008, with Cameron added to the indictment after he was tracked down to a caravan park in Cornwall where he had been hiding.

That December, Judge Roberts told the jury he was ‘devastated’ to have to tell them that he would have to discharge them as well, despite the ‘enormous cost to the public’.

He did not tell them the reason but had earlier explained to the court: ‘Solid information came to my attention that an attempt has been made to nobble more than one of the jurors on this jury.’

It later emerged that there was evidence of approaches being made to two members of the panel.

The judge decided that, while the trial might need to be heard by a judge alone, he could not do it himself since he had seen this secret and prejudicial material.

But he agreed to continue the defendants’ bail, warning them simply to be ‘extremely careful’ not to do it again.

Another judge, Mr Justice Calvert-Smith, ruled that the next trial could still be heard by a jury, by using an expensive security operation to protect them, but his decision was overturned last June by the Court of Appeal.

At the time, Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: ‘This is a dangerous precedent.

Mr Justice Treacy started the fourth and final trial in January at the Royal Courts of Justice.

He managed to get through all the evidence much more quickly than previous trials had done but there was a hiccup halfway through the case when Blake absconded.

He handed himself in a week later, claiming he had simply wanted to get some clothes.

Blake was remanded back into custody and the case was switched to the Old Bailey.

As the trial drew to a close, the judge reviewed bail arrangements for the other defendants and decided to put them behind bars too.

 

‘I NEVER HAD ONE HA’PENNY’: THE FOUR MEN AT THE HEART OF HISTORIC TRIAL

JOHN TWOMEY, now 62, was the ringleader of the six-man Heathrow robbery gang, recruiting its members and masterminding the raid.

Twomey claimed to be an asthmatic with a dodgy heart who had suffered the misfortune of being ‘fitted up’ on various occasions by the Flying Squad.

In fact he was an experienced career criminal with a string of convictions dating back to the 1970s and extensive underworld connections.

But denying any role in the Menzies hold-up, he said: ‘I never had one ha’penny and the money was laundered through a police-run bureau.’

 

Guilty: Glenn Cameron (left) and John Twomey were today found guilty of a £1.75 million robbery at a Heathrow warehouse

Born in Cork in 1948, Twomey moved to Paddington, west London, as a child, later living in Ruislip.

The twice-married father of five is believed by police to have extensive connections in the criminal underworld.

But Twomey claimed his living came from a share in a pub in Ruislip as well as selling items such as DVDs, CDs and shoes.

By the time of the Heathrow robbery he was living in New Milton, Hampshire, where he set up a furniture shop. He was arrested shortly after the heist.

He claimed that he was an alcoholic who spectacularly fell off the wagon on the night of the heist and remembered little about his movements.

Twomey said: ”I’ d had two heart attacks. I had asthma. Nobody would be likely to be going on a robbery with me in case I got caught.’

He claimed that bags stuffed with cash he was filmed carrying later on the night of the robbery in fact contained bottles of beer.

PETER BLAKE was the robber who fired on Menzies employee David Westwood after he bravely tried to flee and raise the alarm during the raid.

The bullet missed but during a struggle with Blake, Mr Westwood tore a black woollen hat from his head and parts of a latex mask from his face – on both of which the robber’s DNA was found.

Blake, 57, threw the latest trial into turmoil when he disappeared from the Royal Courts of Justice.

He said that during his absence he had been driven to a hotel near Ascot by an unnamed friend.

When he returned the following week to give evidence he said he felt let down by the justice system and had never been involved in any jury tampering.

Explaining why he absconded he said: ‘I know I am going to Belmarsh, I am going to get no phone calls, no visits. I needed some clothes.’

Like his co-defendants, he had been on bail but after his flit he was remanded into custody and proceedings were subsequently transferred to the Old Bailey.

Haul: Bundles of Australian 50 dollar notes, taken from Menzies warehouse and recovered from a Bureau de Change in Notting Hill

Blake, who grew up in south-east London before moving to Notting Hill, admitted he had a ‘long criminal history’ but told Mr Justice Treacy: ‘This is way out of my league, this Menzies robbery.’

He claimed he had not met any of his co-defendants until after his arrest.

Blake was arrested over the Heathrow heist in 2005. He has denied any part in the raid and said he would have been on the way home from visiting his ailing mother at the time.

BARRY HIBBERD, 42, was well known to police in Shepherd’s Bush as a football hooligan who followed Queens Park Rangers.

With several convictions for violence, including a stabbing, he provided muscle for Twomey’s robbery gang.

Senior prosecutors said he, along with Blake, was recruited because of his ‘knowledge of, or contact with, firearms’.

He also had ready access to firearms.

Hibberd livened up the trial with a colourful account of the night of the robbery which he claimed he spent carousing with a woman called Caroline in Ruislip after going to the pub following a row with his pregnant partner.

He explained to Mr Justice Treacy how he had been drinking shorts that made him ‘nutty’ and also ‘had a dabble’ of cocaine.

Hibberd claimed he could remember little about the evening, telling the judge: ‘If you can remember a night out then it must have been rubbish.’

He said he later asked a friend to look for Caroline in Ruislip while he was in custody but the description he offered was not much to go on.

In that area, he explained, there must be thousands of ‘blonde birds with big…’ before being cut short by his barrister.

Raid: The heist took place at the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at Heathrow

GLENN CAMERON, Twomey’s brother-in-law, was on the run for three years after the robbery before being tracked down to a small cottage on a caravan park in Perranporth, Cornwall, in March 2007.

He had been using a false name and black bin bags covered the windows of the cottage, the court heard.

Cameron, 50, a roofer with no previous convictions, grew up in East Acton before moving to New Milton.

He said he worked delivering shoes and other goods for Twomey.

Cameron was involved with his brother-in-law in the planning of the raid.

The pair were captured along with Hibberd arriving at a nearby hotel just moments after the heist, along with a holdall and a large plastic bag apparently stuffed with stolen money.

Cameron claimed that he too was on a night out at the time of the raid.

It’s murder every day in the Old Bailey

From The Sunday Times

January 31, 2010

David James Smith

Gang violence, terrorism, honour killings… it’s all in a day’s work at the Old Bailey. We’re given unprecedented access to the hallowed halls of the criminal courts

 

There is a place in my heart for the Old Bailey. One afternoon, 18 years ago, I went along to the Central Criminal Court and took a seat at random. I thought I was going to research a satirical drama about the judiciary, and I suppose I was hoping to hear a judge comment on the fragrance of a Tory wife or ask who the Beatles were. Instead, I found a well-off teenager in the dock alongside a wild, older Glaswegian. Together, as I discovered that afternoon, they had got drunk, taken drugs, tormented and finally killed a vulnerable local man in his own flat. The middle-class youngster described how he had pressed his palms against the wall for leverage as he had jumped up and down on his victim’s prostrate body. He recalled how he had listened to the sound of the ribs cracking.

The incident had taken place in Pinner, northwest London, a place I knew well as I had once been responsible for writing the “Pinner Pars” of the local newspaper, the Harrow Observer, a bland weekly offering of planning-committee decisions and church fêtes. There was never, ever the slightest hint of the dark world of drink and drug-fuelled violence inhabited by the men in the dock. It seemed at the time to be a glimpse of the savage reality just beneath the surface of our civilised western ways. I was haunted by what I heard. Abandoning all thoughts of satire, I went on to write about that case in detail. It was the start of a life of crime narratives involving long, carefully researched articles and the occasional book.

I have been to the Old Bailey often since, sometimes following cases for many weeks. I have seen jurors cry and watched the expression of horror pass across their faces as they are passed photographs of a corpse. I have sat through the brutal facts of a crime or the gruesome details of a postmortem, rendered almost banal by the monotone fashion in which they were delivered by a lawyer, a police officer or an expert witness. I have felt ashamed, sitting there listening, with the victim’s family nearby, and have occasionally carried with me back into my life things I wish I didn’t know. I stopped eating HobNobs after hearing they were found in the stomach of a child who had been fed them in an allotment shed by the paedophile who attacked and killed him. The naming of the biscuit was the vivid, everyday detail that made the child’s death all too real. I feel that inevitably some of that sordid information has seeped into my soul — a kind of guilty knowledge about what people can do to each other, and have always imagined that must be true for many other people at the Old Bailey — jurors, police officers, lawyers and judges alike.

The Old Bailey has become familiar to me, and yet there is much about it that I have never seen or understood. Entry to the public gallery is strictly controlled. If the case is gang-related – as many are these days – and there is a fear of intimidation, you may, on the judge’s orders, have to give your name and address before you enter. No amount of protest that your human rights are being infringed will wash with the patient, well-trained security guards, such as Matthew Butler and Svetlana Dotsenkova, who told me how it “kicks off” when rival families or gang members sneak plastic or wooden weapons past the metal detectors. Knives and guns must be left at home. Nor, as the sign says, will you be allowed in with children, bags, holdalls, mobile phones, cameras, cassette or CD players (no mention yet of iPods).

The public has no access to the Old Bailey beyond the gallery, so never sees its magnificent marble hall and muralled dome, nor the corridors and open waiting areas where lawyers, detectives, reporters gather in huddles and talk in whispers about their cases, breaking off altogether as a jury files past in a 12-strong crocodile for fear they may be overheard, throw a case into disarray and land up in the dock accused of contempt.

Beyond these areas there is a backstage world, the engine of the place, which I had always wondered about but never seen. What mysteries could be solved behind those doors? What are the secrets of the Old Bailey?

After lengthy negotiations over several months, The Sunday Times Magazine was invited in, given exclusive access to staff and accorded the rare privilege of being able to take photographs inside the building. The unique opportunity opened many doors within the Old Bailey for the first time.

Matron – a busy woman about the court who I had seen many times but never spoken to – invited me to her office and told me she had not given an interview in 16 years. A world exclusive! Heads turned as we marched through the Bar mess to the kitchens; barristers stopped and stared as the photographer, Zed Nelson, set up his shots. A grumpy maintenance man threatened to blow Zed’s equipment up when he left it unattended behind a pillar. We’ve had bombs here, you know, he said. That was true. It was in 1973. A car bomb left in the street outside (the street itself is called Old Bailey) by the Provisional IRA. There is still a glass shard embedded in a wall above the top of the main stairs as a reminder. These days the fear is not of Irish extremists but of Al-Qaeda.

Court staff are subjected to Criminal Records Bureau investigations and Counter Terrorist Checks. Everyone arriving during busy times confronts a long delay of airport-style security at the lobby bottleneck, where they must be cleared to enter by security staff, then pass through one of two reinforced Perspex pods before walking under a metal detector and sometimes subjected to a second check with a hand-held machine.

The country’s leading prosecutor, First Senior Treasury Counsel Jonathan Laidlaw QC, was ribbed one morning by his colleagues after I told them he had been photographed. He refused to wear his wig and gown for his pictures, did not want to be seen as pompous, I think, yet supported the demystifying of the Central Criminal Court implied by the access given to this magazine.

A comprehensive boy, who had failed his 11 plus, he is not your archetypal public-schooleducated barrister with a cut-glass accent and a self-confident veneer. Surprisingly, when I asked Laidlaw if he could remember his first appearance at the court, he said it had been a thrilling but terrifying rite of passage and he had never lost his nervousness. He believed he was, by nature, a nervous person, and even though he did not like to think of himself as an actor – “there are barristers who indulge in theatrical performances, but I don’t think juries are impressed by it and they see through it” – he accepted the anxiety that came with his public performances.

As a prosecutor he “opens cases”, outlining the evidence against the accused, setting out what the Crown claims they have done and how they will attempt to prove it in court. Cross-examination, legal argument, closing speeches, they too are moments that bring on nerves. Laidlaw said that hiding behind a horsehair wig and a black gown helps. His own wig had been stolen from the robing room of the Inner London Crown Court some years ago (a robing room is a place reserved for barristers – an untrustworthy bunch, clearly) and the wig he now wears is an old theatrical prop that he bought second-hand as a replacement. He still has the wig tin though, inscribed JT Laidlaw Esq, bought for him by his mother 25 years ago to mark his “coming to the Bar” after completing his pupillage. The tins (which start at £185), wigs, gowns and other accessories of the judges and lawyers are bought from Ede & Ravenscroft in Chancery Lane (“London’s oldest tailor and robe-maker”).

The Old Bailey had until recently tried the most serious or high-profile cases across a variety of the serious crimes. In the past year or so, it has been designated almost entirely as a murder court. The building manager, the “keeper of the court”, Stephen Jones, showed me the whiteboard where they keep a court-by-court list of current cases: it was all murder, murder, murder, rape, manslaughter, attempted murder, murder and so on, throughout the 18 courts.

The long-serving freelance court reporter David St George, who has been working out of the Old Bailey press room since 1969, recalled a young boy appearing for stealing two cream buns. Trials of cake felons are rare these days. Often now it is gang-related murders with several defendants all lined up in the dock together.

St George collected a “what’s on where” court list every morning from the Lists Office when he arrived. He had the lists going back to 1969, all except the ones that had been blown up by the IRA when the press room had taken much of the car-bomb blast – and never used a notebook, making notes on the blank backs of the list sheets that he later typed up as copy.

Jonathan Laidlaw had most recently opened in court 13. A passing reporter had told me I ought to go in there and take a look. “You should check out the honour killing in 13, unless you want to see the 15-year-old psychopath giving evidence next door.” That was court 14, where two women were about to be convicted in the killing of a third teenager, who had died after she jumped out of a window to escape them. Hatice Can was just 13 when she and her then 17-year-old friend Kemi Ajose bullied, abused and tormented Rosimeiri Boxall, the daughter of a vicar. “Serves you right, bitch,” Can had told Boxall as she lay in the street dying following her desperate leap.

Laidlaw told me his honour killing was a good case, a fascinating case, casually betraying a practitioner’s absorption in tragedy. He meant no offence, of course, but you would never tell a family that their daughter’s murder was good or fascinating. In this case her family were the ones accused of killing her. The “proof of life” inquiries carried out by detectives 10 years ago showed that Tulay Goren, a 15-year-old Turkish Kurdish woman then living with her family in Woodford Green, north London, had disappeared off the face of the earth on January 7, 1999. The police had long suspected she had been killed, but her body had never been found. The case was about to be shelved, finally, a few years ago when it was reviewed by officers from the Specialist Crime Directorate, who decided that, even without a body, there was still a case to answer. It is highly unusual to have a trial without a body. In this case there were even greater problems, with no crime scene and virtually no forensic evidence beyond a few hairs on a washing-line rope. The police could not say, and Laidlaw could not say, where or when or how Tulay had been killed, but they argued that the known evidence pointed inexorably to her murder.

Her father, Mehmet, was in the dock, alongside his older brother, Ali, and his younger brother, Cuma. The trio of Goren brothers sat flanked by guards and interspersed with Turkish interpreters. I watched as they sat and smiled and joked quietly with the interpreters, one of them a woman, and I wondered what the jury thought, as they too could see them, sitting there laughing while facing a life sentence for their young relative’s murder.

I saw Tulay’s father giving his evidence, endeavouring to present himself as a man who had fought for women’s rights, who did not believe in the honour code, and had been lying when he told an immigration appeal he had hit Tulay’s boyfriend on the head with an axe because he had felt shame at the boy stealing his daughter’s virginity. That was a lie, he said. He had only hit him with the axe because he lost his temper.

He recalled occasions before his daughter’s disappearance when he had physically assaulted her. There was the day he had slapped her a couple of times. “I may have kicked her as well, but I’m not sure about that.”

Mehmet’s defence barrister sought to arouse the jury’s empathy with his client, eliciting the evidence that he had not liked seeing his son on the street with his hip-hop trousers down his legs and his back exposed when he was supposed to be at school. “That applies to many of us with teenage children,” said the QC. But Mehmet was not a normal parent. His wife had pointed to him in the dock during her own evidence, challenging him to disclose what he had done to their daughter. She too had been arrested on suspicion of complicity in the murder, but instead became a witness for the prosecution. She told the police she had waited 10 years for her day in court. At the verdict only Mehmet was convicted. His brothers went free.

In past centuries, trials were brief affairs, often with brutal outcomes, but nowadays, as in R v Goren, Goren and Goren in Court 13, they often grind out the evidence over weeks of not-always-gripping testimony. A QC apologised during one break for the lack of drama. “I’ve never had a more boring afternoon,” he said.

Trials follow a rigid pattern of short days punctuated by breaks to keep everyone focused: 10.30 start, mid-morning break, lunch, mid- afternoon break, court rise at 4.30 by the latest.

The prisoners go downstairs to their cells at lunch and eat ready meals or packed lunches brought with them from their prisons. Upstairs the judges participate in the daily ritual of the Sheriffs’ Lunch, sometimes known as the Judges’ Lunch. It begins at 13.10 and ends sharp at 13.53 so they can get back for a 2pm start in court.

In the 19th century, the Old Bailey was a small court adjacent to Newgate Prison, and judges and their guests would enjoy orgies of wine and food, often delaying trials late into the night before the judge might return drunk to condemn a man to be hanged. A hanging remained a public spectacle in the street outside until late into the century. Crowds of up to 80,000 would gather and the poor would pelt the victims with stones and rotten fruit and veg while the rich would tuck into hanging breakfasts in overlooking rooms at local inns, such as the Magpie & Stump. In 1807 a pie-seller’s stall overturned and 28 people were crushed to death. A secret tunnel, now blocked at either end, was created between the prison and the church of St Sepulchre’s across the way, to allow the priest to visit the condemned man without having to force his way through the debauched and riotous crowds.

The condemned would be led along Dead Man’s Walk between the prison and the court, and many were buried in the walk itself, which was also known as Birdcage Walk after the lattice iron-work cage that was built around it.

The modern lunches are sober affairs by comparison. It was cottage pie the day I was there. Two courses – no time for more – a starter and a main, or a main and a dessert. Wine is usually served at the lunches, no doubt more for the guests than the judges, whom I suspect need all the help they can get to stay awake and alert through the longueurs of the afternoon sessions.

Each day brings a handful of guests: sports stars, actors, TV presenters from time to time, but more often businessmen and women or city dignitaries. Sometimes they go into court for a few minutes afterwards to watch the show. Years ago I was sitting in Court No 1 when Michael Parkinson and Betty Boothroyd, the former House of Commons speaker and ex-Tiller Girl, suddenly appeared through a side door. They’d come in to watch snatches of the Barry George trial; Parkinson was a BBC colleague of Jill Dando’s.

The Old Bailey is not a public place in the conventional sense but is owned and run by the City of London Corporation, who finance the building itself, the running of it, the staff and the maintenance out of their own resources, gathered from businesses in the Square Mile. HMCS – Her Majesty’s Courts Service – manage the courts and administer the trials themselves, but the rest is down to the City, which brings with it a kind of pageantry expressed in the ancient rituals and titles of the people who work there.

Charles Henty describes himself as being like the managing director of the Old Bailey, but he is not known as the MD, he is the Secondary of London (also Under Sheriff and High Bailiff of Southwark). People sometimes ask him who the Primary is, and he always tells them it’s his wife. (Do you have a wig? I asked him. No, came the sharp reply, it’s all my own.)

An old soldier and old Etonian, Henty travels to and from his home in the West Country on his motorbike. He wears a suit to work, but often changes into his ceremonial garb, breeches, buckled shoes and a tail coat over a ruffled shirt – a get-up itself known as an Old Bailey. His job is part-ceremonial, but is principally to ensure the court runs smoothly, with all its component parts in good order. He likes to say the court is a service that nobody wants but society needs.

After seeing active service with the army and suffering the loss of his brother, a News of the World photographer, Ed Henty, who was killed by the IRA bomb at Bishopsgate in 1993, Henty was already pretty hardened when he came into the job. He disputed my suggestion that he would be “tainted” by the raw material of the work at the Old Bailey, but conceded it took its toll. He would sometimes be invited by a judge to sit in the court, to educate him, as he put it, about certain types of human behaviour. On one occasion he was sitting next to the mother of the victim in a case where the defendant was accused of having sex with the corpse – the woman’s daughter. As Henty said, it was not the kind of job where he could bring in his children to show them Daddy’s office.

Later I sat with the Old Bailey’s most senior judge, the Recorder of London, Judge Peter Beaumont QC, in his chambers, an elegant wood-panelled room behind the courts, drinking tea from china cups while he sat back in the chair behind his desk looking wearied from his day in court. He was the 98th consecutive Recorder since 1298, but not many of his predecessors would have seen the kinds of cases he now tried. He was running a complicated trial with six defendants, gang-related, an Operation Trident case, so-called “black-on-black” crime, which was depressingly prevalent in the Old Bailey lists. Beaumont and his fellow judges had to be “murder ticketed” to try these cases, a qualification dispensed by the Judicial Studies Board. It meant the judges were well qualified and highly experienced at managing such trials, even if, as elderly or middle-aged white men, they were worlds apart from the lives of the victims and the defendants.

Beaumont said he did not know the statistics but he had detected a change in the nature of the murders before the court. There are fewer of the domestic variety – husband kills wife or vice versa – and more of the “multi-handed knife- or gun-related crime” such as his current case. The police have more difficulties getting witnesses into court and rely on special measures, which can hide a witness behind curtains or allow them to give evidence by video link without ever setting foot in the court. New technology evidence, such as cell-site identification, which locates somebody by the position of their mobile phone, is coming increasingly to the fore.

Even though judges can still be sitting by the time they reach their early seventies, they remain alert, Beaumont assured me, not least through their meticulous note-taking as an aide-mémoire to the case summary they will later present to the jury. He accepted the role of ritual in the life of the Old Bailey, as a way of connecting the present to the past and maintaining the link between the building and its owners, the City of London Corporation. Beaumont believed the costume was important as a way of reinforcing the authority of the court and assisting the judge, who did not use a gavel, and had only the force of his personality to keep order. “To that end, he needs all the props he is given.”

Beaumont noted the stress that witnesses and others often experience at the Old Bailey, and when I sat with Matron in her office she confirmed, between the constant ring of her phone from one patient or another, that stress was the biggest affliction she faced in her work.

I remembered Matron from the first trial of Barry George, the man convicted and later acquitted of the murder of Jill Dando. George had kept Matron busy with his unusual complaints, which could be considered extreme forms of stress. He had once groped his way into the dock of Court No 1 claiming to have gone blind – a kind of hysterical blindness. Another time he lost his voice, a condition known as aphonia, which can have psychological causes. Matron, Catherine Waters, would not discuss George with me because of patient confidentiality, but did not appear to have been fazed by his illnesses. She said she never assumed anyone was faking and always called everyone – even defendants (innocent until proven guilty, after all) by their first names. Her office is in the corner of the modern wing of the court, built in 1972, which overlooks the original 1907 building, topped by the dome with the 16ft figure of Lady Justice rising above it. Matron recalled: “I had a defendant in the chair opposite me one day and he looked out of the window and caught sight of Lady Justice. ‘Would that be brass or copper?’ he asked, with professional interest.” (Lady Justice is bronze.)

I went for a pint at Ye Olde London with the reporter David St George. He once drank at the Magpie & Stump with John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. Rumpole had been a better barrister than Mortimer, said St George. Now the Magpie was a trendy bar (“Rumpole would turn in his grave”) and the court business was not like the old days. Reporters no longer play cricket or practise their golf swing in the corridors; it has been years since St George organised one of his once regular sweepstakes on how long a jury would take to return a verdict.

St George was slippery about his age, but I would guess was in his late sixties, not as old as some judges, perhaps, but older than all the police officers. Like the wigs and the red robes, he is a connection to the past, a former Fleet Street tea boy, now a veteran of all the great Old Bailey trials of recent times, from the Yorkshire Ripper — a “nut or gut” case, according to St George — and Jeremy Thorpe, who used to sit on a rubber cushion he carried with him to ease his piles, to the Soham murderer, Ian Huntley. But St George remembered the smaller cases, not the big ones. He remembered the blagger who stood in the box for 2½ days complaining he had been fitted up by the police. “Members of the jury,” he had said, pointing at the police, “the Old Bill over there, they planted the f***ing lot.”

At two o’clock on the third day, they all came back from lunch, and the blagger abruptly changed his tune, as his barrister went ashen on the bench. “Judge, members of the jury, sorry about this, but actually… I’m as guilty as sin.”

Children of the Old Bailey go from victims to knife-wielding offenders

From The Times

March 29, 2005

By Sean O’Neill

 

 

 

HIGH on the walls of Old Bailey, the London street that lends its name to the world’s most famous court, is carved the austere mission statement of the Central Criminal Court.

It reads: “Defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.” Like the stonework, the sentiment expressed is tarnished. Increasingly, it seems, the children are the wrongdoers who come to the building for trial and punishment. This month alone, three schoolboy killers have been tried for murder. In each case, knives were used.

The third of these frighteningly similar trials ended in Court 15 with the conviction of Lasells Hazel, now 17, for the manslaughter of Kieran Rodney-Davis.

Kieran, 15, from Fulham, was stabbed in the chest after being confronted by a gang of masked teenagers, who stole his fashionable New Era baseball cap. Hazel, who burst into tears in the dock as the guilty verdict was returned, was not the youth who stabbed Kieran in the chest.

Continuing police inquiries led last week to the arrest of two youths in connection with the murder. They were subsequently released on bail.

A few days before Hazel’s conviction, in Court 10 Hakeem Johnson was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for stabbing a pizza waiter in an argument over the price of a meal.

Johnson, of Highbury, North London, who was excluded from school, was just 13 when he stabbed Noor Kasimi, 32.

Three floors below, in Court 18, a jury found a 15-year-old boy guilty of the murder of Robert Levy, 16, in Hackney, East London. The youth, whose identity is protected by court order, pulled a knife after accusing another group of youths of “staring him out” on the street.

In March 1995, the cases that grabbed headlines in the court involved adults charged with rape and the trial of a man charged with starting a fire that killed 11 people in a pornographic cinema in Smithfield, Central London. A decade on, the court lists are dominated by knife-wielding teenagers whose readiness to use lethal violence is almost casual. These teenage defendants carry themselves with a swaggering defiance.

“The young age of the defendant is not the exception any more, it has almost become the rule,” Dave St George, who has been reporting trials at the Old Bailey for 35 years, said. “And it’s not just the Old Bailey. The other courts across London and the whole country are dealing with these crimes every day.”

Uanu Seshmi works with children who, he fears, have the potential to become Old Bailey defendants. They have been excluded from their schools, abandoned by their parents and found a sense of belonging by joining street gangs. In those hierarchies, respect is earned by carrying and using a knife.

“Young people are being fed a diet of gangster culture,” Mr Seshmi, director of the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, said. “It’s hip to be a gangster, hip to call women bitches and whores, hip to carry a knife, pull it out and stab someone. Carrying a knife is a statement, it’s making a stand — and stabbing a man is now an acceptable way of resolving conflict. This is a nationwide thing, an inner-city thing from London to Liverpool to Newcastle. There are many, many stabbings — wounds to the legs and arms — that are never reported to the police.”

Many of the teenagers he works with tell him that they carry knives for protection because they are frightened of being attacked. Others arm themselves because the knife has become a “street icon”.

Some are very aware that possession of a knife is an offence that carries a light sentence compared with carrying a gun. Nevertheless, guns, he said, were also becoming more common among teenagers.

Mr Seshmi’s recipe for tackling the knife culture is “tough love” — to challenge the youths and make them accept responsibility for their behaviour — but the programmes he runs are poorly resourced and some face closure.

He supports calls for tougher sentences for carrying knives and, controversially, a wider use of stop and search by the police. He said: “The situation is bad and getting worse, but if something is not done about these kids, to challenge their behaviour and give them an education, we are going to have a hell of a problem on our hands in five years’ time.”

From The Times

July 4, 2009

 

David Brown

How model found words to bring killer to justice

Mario Celaire, the first person prosecuted under double-jeopardy legislation

Moving her hand slowly along a board of words Kara Hoyte pressed her finger against “yes”. From her intensive-care bed, the teenager had made the first step in identifying the attacker who had left her braindamaged and partially paralysed.

Yesterday Ms Hoyte was at the Old Bailey to see Mario Celaire receive two life sentences after her evidence proved that her former boyfriend, a professional footballer, had attempted to murder her. Her evidence also forced Celaire finally to admit the manslaughter of another former girlfriend seven years after he was found not guilty by a jury of killing her.

The Old Bailey was told of the courage that Ms Hoyte had shown in painstakingly piecing together the evidence that led to Celaire’s guilty pleas.

Ms Hoyte, 19, an aspiring model, had been found with severe head injuries caused by a hammer in her East London flat in February 2007. Police had no idea who carried out the attack and doctors feared that she would die.

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While still in intensive care Ms Hoyte was given a board and pen and began scrawling “eo”. Her mother, Eunice Lander, then wrote on the board “yes”, “no” and “don’t know”. She asked her daughter if she knew who carried out the attack and the teenager’s hand pressed on the word “yes”. The man who left her daughter for dead was the childhood friend who had twice come to visit her in intensive care. During months of painstaking work Ms Hoyte not only recalled details of the attack but remembered how the former Maidstone United player had confessed he had killed his previous ex-girlfriend.

Nine months after the attack Ms Hoyte, of Leytonstone, East London, was able to tell detectives what had happened, despite continuing to be paralysed down her right side and suffering severe speech difficulties. She told also of how Celaire had admitted killing Cassandra McDermott. Ms Hoyte believes that he had tried to kill her to prevent her repeating his confession.

Celaire, of Sydenham, had been cleared at the Old Bailey of murdering Ms McDermott in 2002. The court was told that he had beaten her and left her to die at her mother’s house in Norbury, South London, after years of violence.

The double jeopardy rule that prevented anyone from being tried twice for the same crime was changed in 2005 for cases where “new and compelling evidence” could be produced. After Ms Hoyte’s evidence, prosecution lawyers applied to reopen the inquiry into Ms McDermott’s killing and successfully got the acquittal quashed in the Court of Appeal.

On the day that the trial was due to start last month, Celaire finally admitted the manslaughter of Ms McDermott and the attempted murder of Ms Hoyte. It emerged yesterday that aged 15 he had been jailed for four years for raping a 17-year-old girl with learning difficulties. Ms Hoyte sat quietly at the back of the court as Simon Denison, QC, read a poignant statement she had addressed to “Mario”:“I leave here today free with the whole world at my feet. You, on the other hand, have a long time to reflect and to understand you cannot control another person.”

After the sentencing, Miss Hoyte, who can talk again, spoke of her horror when Celaire visited her in intensive care before she could warn her family that he was the attacker. “I thought, this is not real, I wanted to scream, to push him to go away but I couldn’t because of the breathing tubes,” she said.

“I knew I had to tell my mum it was Mario.” She revealed the difficulties that she faces. “I’ve lost my independence. I can’t walk and I can’t talk properly. Every day I shower and dress myself and then I look in the mirror and it is disgusting,” she said.

But she must stare in the mirror for hours at a time while practising the word pronunciation and arm movements that, step by step, are helping rebuild her life.

Adam Fresco

From The Times

July 10, 2009

Gang jailed for murder of innocent teenager Shaquille Smith

(Metropolitan Police Service/PA)

Left to right: Amisi Khama,18, Leon Atwell, 17, George Amponsah,19, Kadean Dias, 18, Freddie Amponsah, 17, Godiowe Dufeal, 20

 

Six members of a teenage knife gang who murdered a schoolboy were branded arrogant cowards by a judge yesterday as he jailed them for life.

Shaquille Smith, 14, the youngest of 22 teenagers stabbed to death in London last year, was attacked by London Fields Boys gang members. The group rode bicycles around Hackney, East London, in hoodies harassing anyone who crossed their path. Shaquille was targeted simply because they wanted to attack someone.

They came across the promising student, his sister and a friend in a park just before midnight, with a witness telling the Old Bailey that they swept into the area “like a wild pack of dogs”.

Some chased Shaquille’s friend, threatening him with a knife as he fled for his life. Others attacked his sister, slashing her across the face. Shaquille, a “kind, caring and considerate” boy with no links to gangs, was punched, kicked and stabbed in the stomach.

 

Godiowe Dufeal, 20, George Amponsah, 19, Amisi Khama, 18, Leon “Little” Atwell, 17, Kadeen “Hidz” Dias, 17, and Freddie “Chips” Amponsah, 17, were identified from closed-circuit television images of them roaming the streets before the murder last August. George Amponsah and Dufeal were given 18 years’ custody. The others received 15-year minimum terms. Judge David Paget, QC, told them: “Shaquille Smith was truly innocent. One of you stabbed him fatally and you ran away like the cowards you are back to London Fields.

“You have taken away the life of a promising young boy and have thrown away the chances of achieving anything in your own young lives.”

Dufeal was on licence after convictions for possessing a prohibited weapon and ammunition without a certificate. He also had convictions for possessing knives, disorderly behaviour and assaulting a police officer.

George Amponsah had previous convictions for affray, threatening behaviour, possession of an offensive weapon in public, possession of cannabis and common assault.

(Metropolitan Police/PA)

Shaquille Smith: he was a promising student

Shaquille’s mother, Sandra Maitland, who had allowed him to go out that night because he had been good all week, said: “Every day since Shaq’s death, myself, his father, his siblings, extended family and friends feel lost, bewildered and tearful, hoping it is a bad dream. Why would someone as innocent as Shaquille become a target for someone to wilfully inflict pain on him when he was not being confrontational or making any trouble? Only the person who inflicted that injury can answer that question.”

She said that her son was on the verge of growing up. “Shaq loved to give you sloppy kisses or just cuddle up with you. He was polite and respectful to both elders and young adults in any situation.”

She has visited young offenders in prison to speak to them about the effects of knife crime. “I think everybody can change,” she said. “People make mistakes, but it’s how you use those mistakes.”

THE TIMES ONLINE ARCHIVE

 

The Kray twins

At least 30 years’ gaol for Krays

The Kray twins, Ronald and Reginald, aged 35, were sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson recommending that they should be detained for a minimum of 30 years – the longest sentences ever passed at the Central Criminal Court for murder

• Picture gallery: The Krays

EARLY DAYS

Twins accused of menaces

Ronald and Reginald Kray, described as company directors, of the Glenrae Hotel, Seven Sisters Road, were remanded in custody until January 15

Curate tells court of "talk about perjured evidence"

Charles Kray told him: ‘Just tell the truth Sidney, that is all.’ Vaughan retorted: ‘That is not so easy when you are dealing with McCowan’

The Kray twins cleared

The retrial of the Kray twins and Edwards Smith, alleged to have been concerned in a plot to obtain ‘protection’ money from a Soho club owner, collapsed yesterday

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Lord Boothby: ‘No decision on writ’

Lord Boothby told reporters he had only seen Mr Kray twice on business matters

Lord Boothby on MPs’ visit

Lord Boothby told reporters at his flat at Eaton Square, London, last night, how he first heard rumours about himself and Ronald Kray

• Lord Boothby’s question on Kray brothers

FRANK MITCHELL

Kray twin accused of killing ‘axe man’

Reginald Kray and another man were charged with murdering escaped Dartmoor prisoner Frank Mitchell soon after allegedly helping him to escape

Mitchell shot by gang, QC says

A few minutes after Frank ‘axe man’ Mitchell had been shot four times through the head in an East End street, a telephone call was made to one of the Kray brothers saying: ‘The dog is dead’

Krays guilty of murder

Jury find the Kray twins guilty of the murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie in under an hour

GEORGE CORNELL

‘Ronald Kray said he had shot George’

John Dickson said in evidence yesterday, that while in a car with Ronald and Reginald Kray, Ronald told his brother that he had ‘shot George’

Ronald Kray denies that he killed Cornell

Ronald Kray denied in evidence at the Central Criminal Court yesterday that he went to the Blind Beggar public house in Stepney, on the night that George Cornell is alleged to have been killed there

JACK "THE HAT" McVITIE

Witness saw Reggie stab man to death

A witness said yesterday that he saw Reginald Kray stab a man to death while the man was being held from behind by Ronald Kray

‘McVitie tried to run’

Mr Jack McVitie had twice tried to escape before he was killed, a prosecution witness said

‘Kray said twins had done McVitie’

Mr. Dickson said he was quite sure he had heard it said that Mr McVitie was stabbed 10 times

• Reginald Kray calls QC a ‘fat slob’

Chris Smyth

From The Times

August 3, 2009

Criminal trials from 18th and 19th centuries go online for first time

 

 

On March 2, 1882, Roderick Maclean brandished a pistol outside Windsor railway station and attempted to shoot Queen Victoria.

Things did not go according to plan. The monarch lived and Maclean was charged with high treason, but acquitted on the ground of insanity. Ordered “to be kept in strict custody and gaol until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known”, he spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital.

His case is one of 1.4 million criminal trials from the 18th and 19th centuries that feature in registers that go online for the first time today.

A murderous doctor who claimed to be Jack the Ripper, the crook thought to have inspired Fagin, and a notoriously inept highwayman are all listed in the carefully handwritten ledgers that can be browsed on the ancestry.co.uk website from this morning.

The records, published in a collaboration between the website and the National Archives, include every criminal trial in England and Wales that was reported to the Home Office between 1791 and 1892.

It was a deadly period to be a criminal — the “Bloody Code” when more than 200 different offences carried the death penalty was in place at the start of this era — and the documents detail 10,300 executions as well as 97,000 transportations and 900,000 sentences of imprisonment.

Few crimes were as sensational as Maclean’s. The Queen was unharmed, but The Times said it was “an outrage gross and dastardly in the extreme”.

It even inspired a poem by William McGonagall, widely considered the worst poet to have written in English. One stanza runs: “Maclean must be a madman, / Which is obvious to be seen, / Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot / Our most beloved Queen.”

Also mentioned are Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, a crook who was sentenced to transportation in 1830 but not before an escape from arrest and a high-profile recapture that led to him inspiring, so it is thought, the character of Fagin. The hapless highwayman George Lyon, who was condemned to death in 1815, also makes an appearance.

On a page detailing events at the Old Bailey on October 17, 1892, is a simple entry in curling script for one Thomas Neill. In the column listing his offences is “murder” and under sentence “death”. This was Dr Thomas Neill Cream, executed for poisoning several people and one of those suspected of being Jack the Ripper. But it is, perhaps, details of smaller crimes that give the most telling insights into the way that justice, and injustice, were meted out.

These are the cases that would have gone largely unnoticed at the time but which in some instances demonstrate the harshness of a system that in the late 18th century increasingly relied on deterrence to control a growing population in the absence of a police force.

A woman named Sarah Douglas features in one such example. In 1791, aged 63, she was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to New South Wales after a conviction for “stealing table linen”. In the same year an identical punishment was handed out to Mary Wilson, 65, a widow convicted of “stealing a young child aged about 6 months with its apparel and one woman’s cloak”.

Crimes that were punishable by death included theft of goods worth more than five shillings, forgery, stealing from a rabbit warren and being out at night with a blackened face. As the 19th century progressed, a growing campaign for penal reform swept away this “Bloody Code”, replacing it with a less capricious system, and the records show how punishment changed as result.

In 1892, one John William Aylward was found guilty in London of “carnally knowing a girl under 13” and sentenced to an almost modern-sounding 14 years’ imprisonment.

Anomalies persisted, however. John Walker was given seven years’ penal servitude and seven years’ police supervision in 1874 for stealing onions.

The criminal registers, covering 1791-1892, are described as “key documents for the study of serious crime in the 19th century,” by Dr Paul Carter, special projects manager at the National Archives. “Their significance for 19th-century criminal studies would be difficult to overstate,” he said. “There wasn’t an easy way for government to aggregate numbers of crimes in the 19th century, as there was no central record that brought the information together from assizes and quarter-sessions courts.

“The Government was aware that population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation were causing social dislocation and tension; it was also concerned that these tensions manifested themselves in criminality. Here we have the basis of that desire to collect, collate and retain information.”

The documents, held in 279 volumes at the National Archives in Kew, were scanned in by volunteers for the genealogical website ancestry.co.uk and can be searched by keyword. They are available only to subscribers, although the website is offering a free two-week trial.

Lee McConville, Adam Fresco, Will Pavia

From The Times

May 6, 2009

Open Scotland Yard museum of crime, says London mayor Boris Johnson

The museum has the gun Ruth Ellis used to kill her lover in 1955

For more than a century, Scotland Yard’s “Black Museum” has catalogued artefacts from the most gruesome crimes of London — and the exhibits have been considered too horrible to be shown to the public.

Generations of police officers have been granted access to its dimly lit rooms, to see the ghastly relics. For almost everyone else, it has remained off limits.

This restriction in the name of public decency may be about to end. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is backing a plan to turn some of the exhibits into a tourist attraction, a museum to celebrate the capital’s emergency services.

The Black Museum includes objects from the Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen cases — Crippen was in 1910 convicted of murdering his wife and disposing of the body in a bath of acid — and a horrible pair of binoculars.

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Brian Coleman, the chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, is working with the mayor on a plan for the new museum. “The police are quite jealous of some of the information they are allowed access to,” Mr Coleman said. “And to be quite truthful, some of the items are just too gruesome for members of the public — but if we had a Black Museum, we would have tourists queueing round the corner.”

In 1869 Parliament gave the police the authority to retain certain items of prisoners’ property for instructional purposes. An Inspector Neame initially gathered together a collection for training purposes, and the first visitors — the top brass at the Yard — inspected the museum in 1877. When that same year a journalist was denied access to the collection, he named the collection the Black Museum in his subsequent report. The name stuck.

It is currently housed in two rooms on the second floor of New Scotland Yard, overseen by Alan McCormick, a retired police officer. The lighting is dim to avoid bleaching exhibits.

The oldest exhibit is a pair of handcuffs used in 1841 to restrain a mutineer. There is weaponry, including swords concealed in walking sticks — and the poisoned umbrella used in 1978 to kill the Bulgarian writer and dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge.

A briefcase designed to fire a poisoned dart into witnesses on the steps of the Old Bailey — former property of the Kray twins — is also in the collection. They never got to use it.

Then there are those infamous binoculars: when the lenses are screwed into focus a pair of spikes shoot out to blind the user.

Among the more recent exhibits in the museum is the bloodstained uniform worn by PC Keith Blakelock, the officer killed in the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham in 1985, and a section on the serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Parts of the bathroom in which Nilsen hid bodies are in the Black Museum.

For the moment, such artefacts are seen only by police officers and associated professionals as part of their training. MPs and ambassadors have also visited.

The idea is that items would go on display in a “Blue Light Museum”, alongside artefacts from the history of the London ambulance and fire services.

Yesterday Andy Hayman, former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, broadly endorsed the mayor’s plan for an exhibition, describing the museum as “the Madame Tussauds of the Yard”.

Mr Hayman said: “I was rather apprehensive the first time I visited the museum. I wondered if I was being voyeuristic and disrespectful to the victims and their families.

“After a few moments, however. those concerns were replaced with fascination and interest.

“This museum presents such well-kept artefacts of significant historical value it seems a shame the general public do not have the opportunity to have this experience.

“The mayor’s bid to give access to the general public should be encouraged, providing we do not lose sight of our respect for the victims and their families.”

The files of Jack The Ripper

Would you want to know if a Ouija board decided your case?

From The Times

May 28, 2009

Mark Stephens

What goes on in the jury room is secret and the law prohibits any questions. It is time for change, says a leading media lawyer

 

It seems trite law that the secrets of the jury room, however compelling, must never be revealed. The British have a penchant for locking away in the closet distasteful truths about much loved institutions — whether jury deliberations or Liberal politicians.

After the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party, on a charge of conspiracy to murder in the Old Bailey in 1979, Parliament reacted swiftly to protect its own, passing the modern strict liability offence as an absolute bar against revelation of almost anything from inside the jury room.

Unsurprisingly, this step backwards into secrecy caused disquiet. With others, Lord Steyn, the law lord, was demonstrably concerned (in a case before the law lords in 2004) that evidence that could reveal a lack of impartiality in a jury’s deliberations would no longer become public. This meant that the law had no jurisdiction to examine possible miscarriages of justice emanating from the jury room.

He cited two examples. A juror reveals that during deliberations some of the jury who were affiliated with a neo-Nazi group had urged the conviction of the accused, a black immigrant. In the second example, a juror reveals that a majority of the jury refused to deliberate and that the guilty verdict was decided by spinning a coin. “Neither example is either fanciful or extreme: both were suggested to me by decided cases,” he said.  

No one would seriously contest that such verdicts would be unsafe and procedurally perverse.

Many will also remember the notorious 1994 case when Stephen Young, an insurance broker, was convicted of murdering Harry and Nicola Fuller. It transpired that the jury at Hove Crown Court had used a Ouija board in deliberations.

Jurors have exposed yet another flaw in the system recently, expressing concern about the safety of criminal convictions in a shaken-baby syndrome case. Some doctors hold the belief that if three indicia towards the syndrome exist when a child presents, then a “deductive diagnosis” may be made safely. Medical opinion is divided strongly. Two jurors concerned about this conflict and consequent reliability of a criminal conviction spoke out after Keran Henderson, a childminder, was found guilty by 10-2 of a child in her care.

There is no officially publicised method of bringing injustice to light. So what is the responsible juror, pricked by conscience, to do? In the cases above, jurors sought out responsible media and gave interviews airing their concerns in very measured tones. Not sufficiently measured for the Attorney-General, it transpired, who instituted criminal proceedings for contempt.

To date, jurors have been interviewed in a number of cases, including that of Barry George, the alleged killer of Jill Dando. These interviews occurred because, until recently, it was believed that the legal matrix had been relaxed so as to permit general disquiet to be expressed by a responsible juror, who would nonetheless be under a continuing obligation to keep the detail of deliberations secret to ensure the proper and effective functioning of a jury. This loosened position was set out in guidance issued in 1982 by Sir Michael Havers, QC, when his was Attorney-General, and reinforced with the adoption into UK law of the European Convention on Human Rights.

A stake was driven through the heart of that guidance in the recent prosecution by the present Attorney-General. In a twist of irony, she instructed Sir Michael’s son, the eminent QC Philip Havers, to prosecute. It was with a certain lightness of touch that Mr Havers said of his father’s guidance: “However eminent the Attorney-General may have been, he may also have been incorrect.”

The decision to prosecute in a genuine case of conscience is surely a retrograde step and the conviction by the Divisional Court is more disquieting, if only for its failure to address the balance necessary between Article 10 (the jurors right to speak) and Article 6 (the right to a fair trial).

One hopes that the House of Lords will accept the petition in this case and give clear guidance as to how a juror may properly express concern at unsafe verdicts and practices, while safeguarding the real noesis: the necessary secrets of the jury room.

The author is head of media law at Finers Stephens Innocent LLP

Alice Miles

From The Times

November 14, 2008

Judgment day for the streetwise kids

What did a group of teenagers from the tough streets of Bermondsey get when they went to the Old Bailey? No, not five to ten years, but an eye-opening day’s education

 

 

It is three and a half miles but a world away from Southwark’s newest school to the Old Bailey. The City of London Academy, a vast steel and glass structure just three years old, gleams amid the industrial estates and iron-gated front doors of this dirty corner of South London. Smartly atop it, slightly incongruously, sits the logo of the Corporation of London.

Sweep down the Old Kent Road through the council estates of Bermondsey, and the late-night off-licences and takeaways quickly give way to yuppy warehouse conversions, boutique shops and shiny developments along the river. Across the Thames is the corporation’s heartland, the City, where bankers in tailored suits drink £3 lattes in Italian delicatessens (at least, they did until last month). In their midst, the Old Bailey squats, heavy stone and marble, getting on for three and a half centuries of history behind it. A golden Lady Justice balances on high. “Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer,” admonishes the inscription over the main entrance.

Inside, in a wood-panelled room hung with cartoons of judges and carpeted in striking blue, six teenagers from the academy are questioning the most senior criminal judge in the country, fresh out of presiding over a murder trial.

“When you sat up there, what was you writing down?”

“Do you ever have jurors nodding off?”

“How do you become a judge?”

“Have you ever thought, ‘I regret doing this’?”

“Have you ever in retrospect thought that you issued the wrong sentence?”

“Why do you wear them robes and the wig?”

Last weekend the 28th death of a teenager through stabbing in London this year took place, just days after Boris Johnson launched a plan to tackle the causes of teenage violence, focusing on education, sport and first-time offenders. We tried another approach: to take six teenagers, selected by their school, around the famous courts and introduce them to the other end of street crime. The City of London, which sponsors the Academy and runs the Old Bailey, hosted the visit, and invited The Times along to watch.

Judge Peter Beaumont, QC, Recorder of London, the most senior judge at the Central Criminal Court (to give the Old Bailey its correct title), answered the barrage of questions adroitly.

“The judge has very little other than his own personality to keep control,” he explained. “We are dealing with people who are under stress, who are often reliving moments which matter a lot to them, there are all the emotions on either side…and if by dressing up in formal clothes and the formality of language that’s used in court we can stop people calling each other names and refusing to answer questions, then the formality helps.” And the wig? “It makes the judge as a figure anonymous.”

What about all that telephone evidence? “People who commit crime, it seems to me, spend an awful lot of time afterwards talking about it on the phone.” He was patient and comfortable with them, as perhaps befits a man with 19 years’ experience of explaining legal terminology to bemused jurors.

“When you first step into court as a judge is a really worrying moment, which you remember till the day you die,” he told the students.

It turned out that I needn’t have worried about the communication gap between the most senior criminal judge in England, a man who spends his life sentencing violent criminals, and a group of students who admitted that their contemporaries generally do not like “the law” because to them it means interrogation by the police.

“He’s just a nice, normal, down-to-earth person!” said Lanyor, a fierce and elegant 16-year-old, of the judge. To my surprise, the students all agreed that the costumery was a good thing.

“Things change but if you have some kind of structure it won’t fall apart,” Lanyor commented thoughtfully.

“If the costume was to change it would lose some of its mystique,” said Jack, who edits the school newspaper.

Their headteacher, Martyn Coles, who had chosen which students to bring, said that he was “terribly proud” of them and the questions that they asked. “Young people don’t know enough about this process. They know about what’s happening in South London, but the consequences, they don’t know about.”

Lanyor, who plans to be a lawyer one day, knows too much about what’s happening in South London. She knew two of the boys stabbed to death on the streets this year: 15-year-old Lyle Tulloch, killed in Southwark, and 16-year-old Shaki Townsend, killed in Thornton Heath.

In Court Six we watched part of a murder trial in similar circumstances: a gang, a silly row, a chase, a knife, somebody stabbed; another pointless death. There was the usual confusion in the evidence. The 18-year-old defendant sat silent and nervous as his barrister cross-examined one of the witnesses.

I say “cross-examined”: slowly, gently, reeled him in, would be more accurate. The barrister was trying to suggest that the dead boy Naz, a friend of the witness, fell on the defendant’s knife; the defendant had not intended to stab him. Relatives of the defendant and the dead man sweated in the public gallery; the teenagers from the academy watched silently behind them.

The witness was hostile, the barrister dangerously polite: a surly black kid, a highly educated white man.

Lawyer: You saw him drop on to the defendant?

Witness: Towards him.

Lawyer: In your police interview, you said, ‘I saw Naz fall down like in front, then like Naz kind of fell like down . . . Naz kind of dropped on to him’.

Witness: Yeah.

Judge Beaumont policed the balance, making sure the witness had the correct statements to assist him, explaining to the jury the (in)significance of someone giving evidence by video. Presumably in 19 years on the bench he has heard it all before.

“Scary,” said Helen as we trooped out. “Very scary.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Lanyor asserted.

“Who was the boy sitting at the back?” asked one of the students of the defendant (who has since been convicted); the witness had appeared to him to be the one on trial. Which, in a sense, he was.

I asked Lanyor whether she thought a visit to the Old Bailey might deter teenagers from getting involved in fights; show them the consequences of picking up a knife, or joining in a fight. She wasn’t convinced. “I know lots of people who have been in prison,” she said. “They are thinking, ‘It’s the end of the road for me’, some of them are thinking, ‘My friends are in Feltham, I can go there and be happy there’. You can’t change their minds.”

Then she got thinking.

“When I was looking at the defendant he was there twitching, biting his knuckles, his family were biting their knuckles, I was like, wow, this is intense. When you see that and see their emotions on their face . . . I would say, ‘Do you know what? The family was there, they might as well have been on trial as well. To know that your flesh and blood – to the mum, her baby – is in a cell, four walls, not going to see daylight again – if you really care about your mum, or your family, you should at least think twice’. That’s what I would tell them.”

Charles Henty would have been proud to hear it. A graduate of Eton, Sandhurst and the Guards, he is a man with three equally baffling titles – the Secondary of London, Under Sheriff and High Bailiff of Southwark – and he runs the Old Bailey with the military precision that you would expect. “The purpose of being here,” he told the teenagers sternly on arrival, “is to educate you as to the consequences of your actions.” If the pupils, all bright A-level students, were slightly bemused, they were too polite to show it.

And first we had to tear them away from the toilets, where they were stuck, awestruck at the marble and the space: “It’s so nice!” One looked quizzically at the fine tap: “How does it work?”

Henty gave us the tour of a lifetime, from the heights to the depths of the Old Bailey, out on the rooftop beneath the scales of Lady Justice and down to the airless prisoners’ cells, smelling of old takeaways: “Do not press any buttons and do not close the doors. I cannot open them,” Henty cautioned, adding for good measure a tale of a category A prisoner who bit into and ate his own arm in one of the cells, “just to prove he was tough”.

We read down the list of defendants due in the next day and from where: Belmarsh, Feltham, Holloway, the litany of social failure. We were shown along a re-creation of Dead Man’s Walk, the series of thinner and thinner arches through which condemned men, women and children would traipse to the gallows – with a horribly claustrophobic feeling of finality about it. Or, as Lanyor put it as she charged down: “It’s fun!”

Henty told them about Nicholas White, hanged aged 9 for the theft of a prisoner’s bed linen. The students fell silent: “Aged 9? He was hanged?” He told them about the medium so spooked when she entered the dead man’s cell, in which the condemned spent their last hours, that she left without speaking.

And in Court One, dark and forbidding, where some of the country’s most famous murderers have been tried – Dr Crippen, John Christie, Ian Huntley – he told them that each case costs on average £80 to £100 a minute to try. “A minute? Oh! Why is that?” exclaimed Lanyor. When she is a lawyer, she will find out.

“Who actually tidies up?” Jack wanted to know now, gazing at the mess of court papers and files abandoned for the evening in mid-trial. And can anyone be a juror – “even a celebrity?”

By the end of the day, Aldaine, a psychology student, had decided that he wanted to work for the witness service, to help people through the court process. Lanyor was more convinced than ever that she would be a lawyer (snap her up, someone). Jack appeared most impressed (a) at the electric-blue carpets – “jazzy, innit?” and (b) at discovering that “there’s real people working here, they have families and things like that”. By now he had struck up an unlikely friendship with Henty, who had changed into ceremonial kit and was sporting a bib with a striking resemblance to a large doily.

Jack was particularly struck that Henty had recently worked from 5am one day until 2am the next without a break. “It seems like it’s not a chore,” he remarked. “Like the people in the witness service, people love their jobs. They really want to help people.”

“Stay on the right side of the law,” Henty admonished them. “You are bright young things – do make sure you use that constructively.”

And then he and Jack went to pore over Henty’s electric-blue motorbike, deep in discussion about his children and his living arrangements at the Old Bailey during the week. “Where do you sleep?” I heard Jack ask.

I was wrong. It isn’t so far from Southwark to the Old Bailey after all.