Ever wondered what happens on a long-term jury trial? A jury foreman reveals all. Well, not quite all. That would be contempt.
I arrived for my first day of jury service expecting a relaxing two weeks, probably without actually having to sit on a trial. However, somewhat ominously, I was informed that a longer trial ‘of possibly two or three months’ was about to commence. 30 of us were directed to a separate room, asked to complete a questionnaire and then attend an interview in court.
At the time, I was a director in a large software company. Not a real director, obviously, but someone with the word director in their job title. A salesman who had negotiated a bigger job title in order to convince himself that he wasn’t really a salesman. During the jury selection process, I attempted to avoid the trial by using the questionnaire to detail my important director’s role. The judge read out my self-aggrandising statement to the court, put the document down, peered over his glasses and asked:
‘How many people work at this company, Mr Atkins?’
‘About 20,000,’ I replied.
‘And they would all be unable to function in your absence?’
I was the first juror to be selected.
Other prospective jurors went to greater lengths to avoid the trial. One appeared with a letter from the chief executive of the huge American corporation where he worked, explaining his essential role in marketing detergent. Another claimed he was unable to read, despite the fact that he could obviously write.
As the unlucky few were chosen and trudged dejectedly to the jury box, it appeared that we were the ones who had been found guilty and sentenced to a long stretch.
The three accused were alleged kingpins of a drugs gang that laundered eye-popping amounts of money. Their defence was that they were honest wholesale greengrocers who dealt only in cash and had been stitched up by bent coppers and untrustworthy bankers.
The trial itself was simultaneously extraordinarily tedious and incredibly fascinating. We would spend days going through handwritten receipts for millions of pounds in cash that had been deposited in Greek banks, our eyes glazing over as yet another receipt was dated and subsequently cross-referenced with flight logs and bank ledgers. The cash, the prosecution said, had been packed into holdalls and carried onto a plane. The defence said such a thing could not be possible – the carry-on bag would be too small or too heavy. Thus we found ourselves watching a small Metropolitan policeman announcing to the court using the patois of a 1970s sitcom: ‘I shall now stuff a million pounds into this holdall, in the manner of a villain what is up to no good, your honour.’ He proceeded to set about packing the money into a British Airways bag before lugging it around the courtroom.
Once the cash reached Greece we discovered how this money could then be transferred to the Channel Islands and, thenceforward, into the City of London where it could be used to buy properties and businesses. We were introduced to characters who manipulated this money and ran these businesses. There was the Jersey bank chief executive responsible for billions of pounds who did not know the size of one billion (‘a million million?’). There was a brothel manager who described their establishment as a ‘gentlemen’s bar’ craftily named The City Office, so that any inquiry as to a customer’s whereabouts when they were in the establishment could be truthfully answered: ‘He’s in The City Office’.
One of the more imaginative attempts to launder money was through the creation of counterfeit historical artefacts. To support this outlandish claim, we heard from experts from around the world who explained the relevant practices in metallurgy, art and archaeology. Two Cambridge professors, who had recently divorced each other, explained their role in analysing the metal, with the ex-wife revealing how she had discovered that ancient Viking jewellery was not the only thing that her husband had been probing late at night in the labs.
As the case progressed into its sixth month, resentfulness among the jurors began to rise. Lateness, sickness and absence increased amid a pervasive air of frustration. The prosecution itself patiently and tediously went through the mountains of evidence, with the defence reliably attempting to refute each fact and demanding the case be dismissed for ‘procedural irregularities’.
One morning, after nine months, shortly before Valentine’s Day, when there seemed to be no end to the case in sight, we walked into court and the judge announced without ceremony that ‘owing to the mislabelling of certain key documents’ the trial was being abandoned and we were dismissed. We all sat there for a few seconds, unable to take in what had happened, and then shuffled out in deep shock, like the traumatised victims of a car accident. There was nothing else to do but to go to the pub.
We sat around a table attempting to make small talk; across the bar was another table on which the prosecution barristers and police officers held their drinks, ashen-faced and utterly depressed. And then we went out into the cold February afternoon and back to our lives – or in my case, to a job that had been handed to someone else and a redundancy notice.
So what are the lessons I took away from this incident? First, if you want to avoid long-term jury service, make sure you have an expensive holiday booked for three months after the start of the trial – this was the only successful reason I saw for being excused. If you can’t avoid the trial, make sure you actually listen to the evidence, because the chances are your case won’t collapse and then it will be highly useful to know what’s been going on, something that didn’t seem to occur to some of my fellow jurors. And finally: jury trials are a brilliant thing. They force the prosecution to present and explain evidence in a way that 12 ordinary people can understand. Our trial was stopped because of mistakes by the police – it was deeply frustrating, but probably the correct outcome. There is no doubt that any trial is an imperfect mechanism for testing guilt, but some of the current well-meaning attempts to stop jury trials for serious crimes in the UK should be approached with caution.
