“Please, be seated,” he said in a quiet voice. As the sound of the gathered audience sitting down echoed around the courtroom, he turned and gave me a very slight nod. Enough to acknowledge my presence, maybe even enough to recognise our previous dealings with each other.
I knew from the clock on the wall opposite me that I had been sitting in the accused enclosure for just over an hour before the judge had called the court to order. It was now just before ten o’clock on Monday morning, and I’d been brought in a few minutes before nine. For the last hour, I’d sat on the hard wooden bench, flanked by Mr Jackson and another prison officer who I didn’t know. One thing I did know about him was that he was a heavy smoker and had disappeared three times in the past hour only to come back stinking of cigarettes. I wouldn’t have minded so much but he didn’t offer to take me with him, even though I’d given up, preferring to leave me in the care of Mr Jackson. I wasn’t sure what the rules were for guarding prisoners in a courtroom with only one officer, but an escape from Mr Jackson seemed very unlikely anyway unless I got a very good head start. The only consolation for sitting on the uncomfortable bench was that if I found it uncomfortable, Mr Jackson must be even more uncomfortable given his size.
We’d left the prison first thing in the morning, and I’d spent the best part of an hour sitting in the holding area underneath the courtroom. It was a soulless place, just a row of individual cells with bars instead of proper doors. No natural light at all, just fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Although the courtroom itself was new, the interior decorators hadn’t spent much time down here. The cells were arranged around a central area with a table and chairs where the prison officers and court officials sat around reading newspapers and drinking tea. The whole room was tired and depressing. To be fair to the staff, it wasn’t much of a staff rest area for them either.
A few minutes after I was brought up to the courtroom from the holding area, the public gallery opened. I watched as Andy and Jacob came through the door to take up seats at the front, and they both raised their hands in my direction as they sat down. I didn’t return their waves as it didn’t seem like the right thing to do, so flashed a wry smile in their direction instead. A few moments later, once the public gallery had filled up completely, I looked back to see if I recognised anyone else. At one end was an elderly couple, a woman and a man deep in conversation, and there were a few other people sitting on their own who I thought might be from the press. Paul had told me that the front cover of the Eastern Daily Press, Norwich’s local newspaper, was carrying a story about my retrial. He said that at some point it would almost certainly be picked up by the nationals as well and as I looked at the seats, I played a game in my mind to match the occupants to the media sources.
At about ten minutes before ten, there was a small commotion at the back of the public gallery. I looked up to see Tommy, David, and Big Joe making a noisy entrance as they asked people to make some space for them. I couldn’t hear them from where I was sitting, but I knew them well enough to know that they wouldn’t be asking nicely. Especially Big Joe. He was just that kind of bloke.
Paul, Laura, and the prosecution lawyers had arrived not long after I had. Laura had gone straight to the defence table, where she busied herself arranging files, notepads, pens, and bottles of water for her and Paul. She was dressed in a business suit and was wearing the satin green blouse that I had seen her in before. The one that was so like Jennifer’s. Laura looked up at me and smiled, and I noticed that she’d had her hair cut. Paul had gone straight to the prosecution table and had been engrossed in conversation with the prosecuting lawyer. It was indeed the same prosecutor from before, Miss Revell, who still looked as evil as she had done at my original trial. She was just as thin, just as nasty looking. She had two young men with her, lawyers perhaps or maybe paralegals? I didn't know who they were and didn’t care, anyway. The two men both wore very serious expressions but looked as if they were just out of school. One of them was arranging the prosecution table just as Laura was doing on the defence table, while the other one was pecking away at a laptop. On another table between the two lawyers’ tables and the back end of the courtroom sat a man and a woman, both with impressive sets of folders in front of them. I had no idea who they were either, but they looked like legal types if there is such a thing. Both well dressed, comfortable sitting where they were, mumbling to each other occasionally. At one point the woman looked across at me but looked away with no change in her expression at all.
Paul and the prosecutor finished their discussion before sitting at their respective tables where they waited for the judge to make his grand entrance. A few minutes before ten, as if there had been a silent alert, they both put their wigs on. Paul slid his hand back across his widow’s peak before he put his hairpiece on. One of the benefits of not having much hair, I guessed. It took Miss Revell a bit longer to sort her hair out underneath hers, and I watched her struggle with it. One of her grey-suited colleagues looked up at her but thought better of offering to help. She eventually got things under control and looked toward the bench with glasses halfway down her pinched nose.
Judge Watling cleared his throat, silencing the murmurs of conversation that had started back up again as people had sat back down. He looked towards the court usher, who was standing by a door on the opposite side of the courtroom.
“Please bring in the jury,” Judge Watling said. The usher opened the door and I watched as the jury filed through. This was my first opportunity to see them. Paul and Laura knew all about them as they’d been involved in the selection process, but I knew nothing about the group at all. I sat with my head forward, and my shoulders down, as instructed by Laura. She had said it was important that the first impression the jurors got of me was of a man in the wrong place. A man who should not be sitting on the accused’s bench. If I’d been sitting there with my head held high and my chest thrust out, Laura had said this would give the wrong impression to the jury, and I had no reason to disbelieve her. The other thing she told me it would be useful to do is to give them names in my head, just made up ones. Something about altering my body language if my mind thought I knew them, making me look friendlier and less like the convicted murderer I actually was.
I glanced at the jurors every few seconds as they filed into their seats. Most of them looked unremarkable, just normal people, but there were one or two who stood out. The third juror in the line was a large black woman, dressed in a multicoloured dress that shouted ‘look at me’. She was staring in my direction as she made her way to her seat, and I cast my eyes back down as soon as I realised she was looking directly at me. She had eyes that bulged just a bit, like someone with that thyroid thing I’d read about in a newspaper once. I didn’t want to stereotype, but she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a gospel choir, so I named her Ella after Ella Fitzgerald. One of Jennifer’s favourite singers. Further down the line was a man who was about my age, and about my size. He would be Mark, which was my middle name, just because he reminded me of me. He was followed by an elderly gentleman who was walking with a stick. On their own, they could have been father and son. I looked back down at my lap, trying to come up with a name for the older chap. The best I could do was Albert, who was a character in a sitcom I used to watch when I was younger. I didn’t know many elderly people who I could name him after, so Albert would have to do. I heard the door close and then looked up to see who had walked in last.
The last juror to take her seat, and the one who was sitting furthest away from the judge and therefore the foreman, was a middle-aged woman of about fifty. She was well built but not fat, and she was dressed in a jacket and trouser suit not unlike the one that Laura was wearing. The thing I liked most about her was her face. Framed with curly brown hair that was streaked with grey, she looked very kind. Almost maternal. I wondered for a few seconds if she was still called a foreman, even though she was female. Was she a forewoman instead? Did it matter? She had a passing resemblance to my old English
teacher, Mrs Rose, who for some reason had quite liked me even though I was shit at the subject. I never knew what Mrs Rose’s first name was, as I only ever called her ‘Miss’, but Rose was a first name as well, so that would do me. Rose she was.
I sat back on the bench and tried to make myself comfortable as the judge went through his preliminary statements. He went through the house rules, what to do and what not to do, and he reminded the jury of their obligations. No watching television, no reading newspapers or going on the internet, no discussing the case with anyone else. Once he had finished, and the jury was sworn in, Judge Watling turned and looked at the prosecution bench.
“Miss Revell, as the prosecutor you have already won the toss. The floor is yours.” I watched Miss Revell nod in the judge’s direction and get to her feet.
“Your Honour, thank you,” she said before turning towards the jury with a brief glance at Paul and Laura. I noticed that she didn’t look at me, and I wondered if that was deliberate. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for attending today. My role within this court is relatively simple. Mr Dawson has already been tried for murder, by a jury of his peers just like you, and found guilty. He has been sentenced to life in prison.” As she continued, I realised her angle appeared to be to convince the jury that this was a waste of their time. That justice had already been done. Her opening comments only lasted for perhaps ten minutes, and she finished with a final reminder to the jury I was already a guilty man. When she had finished, she sat back down and Judge Watling looked directly at me for a couple of seconds before he spoke.
“Mr Dewar, if you would be so kind?” the judge said, but Paul was already getting to his feet.
“Your Honour, my learned friend.” Paul looked at the judge and the prosecutor in turn. He put his hands out to his sides, palms facing towards the jury as if he was welcoming them to his own personal courtroom. “We are all here today at the behest of the Criminal Court of Appeal for the retrial of the young man sitting behind me, Mr Gareth Dawson.”
As he said my name, I sat up a little bit straighter on the bench as instructed by Laura and looked across at the jury. All twelve pairs of eyes were staring back at me. I felt the colour rise to my cheeks as I realised that it wasn’t just the jury who was staring at me, but that it was everyone in the courtroom. If I felt this nervous when everyone was just looking at me, how much worse would it be when I was actually on the stand? I glanced up at the public gallery, looking for Andy. When I caught his eye, he grinned and gave me a discreet thumbs up.
“As you all know, Gareth Dawson was tried and convicted, in this very courtroom, for the murder of Mr Robert Wainwright.” Paul stepped away from his table and walked across to stand in front of the jury’s bench.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if it pleases the court I would like to establish some facts.” He paced slowly up and down in front of the jury as he continued speaking. “It is a fact that my client, Gareth Dawson, planned an attack on Mr Robert Wainwright in May of this year. It is a fact he struck Mr Wainwright with a baseball bat. It is a fact he attempted to mislead the police following the attack.” Every time Paul said the word ‘fact’, he raised his voice and emphasised it with a gentle punch of his right hand into the palm of his left. It was a very effective mannerism, and one which I was sure was well practised. Paul stopped pacing halfway along the jury’s bench. He looked across at me briefly before continuing. “And finally, it is a fact he was convicted of murder by twelve men and women just like you in this very courtroom. They found that Gareth Dawson had murdered Robert Wainwright, and they were certain of that fact beyond…” The final three words of his sentence were delivered with an exaggerated pause between them. “All. Reasonable. Doubt.
If I may, I would like to focus in on the last part of that sentence. All reasonable doubt.” Again, the same pause between the words. “That is the standard of proof which must be upheld in order for this murder conviction to stand. Now, an appeal such as this is normally launched within twenty-eight days of the original conviction. In order for an appeal to be heard outside that twenty-eight-day window, there are certain criteria which must be fulfilled. One of those criteria is, and I quote from the legal text itself, new and compelling evidence.”
Paul walked back to the defence table and picked up one of the files that Laura had placed their earlier. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Paul said as he stood a few feet in front of the jury’s bench. “I do not believe Gareth Dawson killed Robert Wainwright.” He raised the manila file in his hand. “I do not believe Gareth Dawson could have killed Robert Wainwright, and the evidence which I will present to you over the next few days will leave you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, with exactly the same belief. And if you do not believe Gareth Dawson killed Robert Wainwright, if you have any doubt whatsoever that it was not him but somebody else, then it is your duty to find him not guilty of murder and to quash his conviction.”
I looked at the jury. He had them eating out of his hand. The third juror, Ella with the brightly coloured floral dress, was fascinated by the manila folder in Paul’s hand. I had no idea what was in the folder. It could have been this morning’s newspaper for all I knew, but Paul used it as a prop to great effect. He tapped the folder with his free hand, drawing the rest of the jury’s attention to it. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is not even a case of beyond all reasonable doubt. It is a case of having no doubt at all that Gareth Dawson, the young man sitting over there, is innocent of murder.” He paused in front of them for maybe ten seconds, almost as if he was expecting any of them to ask him a question or perhaps challenge him in some way. He walked back towards the defence table, pausing to nod at the judge as he passed him. “Thank you, Your Honour,” he said. As he walked towards the table, Paul looked at me and gave me the briefest of winks.
The rest of his face remained deadpan as he took his seat.
The first week of the trial was, just as Paul had said it would be, a complete run through of the original trial. As Miss Revell talked them through it, all the jurors were given a large black folder with a number on the front, identical to the ones that the man and the woman sitting behind the lawyers had. Within the folders, it soon became obvious, was a complete transcript of the trial right down to copies of the original crime scene photographs. Before the prosecutor got into the meat of the case, she made a short speech about what the purpose of her presentation was. It was simple. The point of it was for me to be found guilty all over again.
I watched the jurors as they flicked through the folders. Mark, who was the closest juror to me in terms of age and size, glanced up at me a couple of times as he leafed through the pages but none of the others looked at me, concentrating instead of the contents of the folders.
“If you could turn to page three of your folders,” Miss Revell said to them, “we’ll start with the statements of those witnesses who were not called to the trial.” Within minutes, I was bored and this boredom increased tenfold over the next few days. Not because I’d heard it all before, it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in what was happening, it was just that Miss Revell was going through the entire folder. Page by page, line by line, almost word by word.
The court soon settled into a routine for those first few days. Miss Revell would start the day with a recap of what had been covered the day before, and then the jurors would turn to whichever page they were starting on that day. Then they were led through it like a school class being walked through a Shakespeare play, with Miss Revell playing the part of the teacher. Every so often she paused the narrative to explain one of the finer points to the jurors even though it wasn’t clear whether or not they understood it. Paul wasn’t joking when he’d told me it would be tedious. The only things that punctuated the days were the breaks for lunch and the occasional coffee break when the judge thought the jury was flagging. The public gallery, full on the first day of the trial, got emptier and emptier until by the end of the week there was no-one left. Even Andy and Jacob had found better things t
o do. Every evening, the judge dismissed the jury, and I was taken straight back to the prison just as Paul had told me I would be. By the time I’d had scoff at the prison, I was exhausted. They were long days, just sitting in a courtroom watching other people reading.
The worst day, or at least the worst day from my perspective, was the Thursday. This was the day that the prosecutor walked the jury through the attack on Robert. As it had done at the first trial, it sounded pretty bad. How I’d planned the whole thing right down to the last detail. What made it worse was that it was all true. The pre-meditation behind the attack on Robert was laid out to the jury with no gloss whatsoever. There was no way it could be sugar-coated, and that wasn’t the intention of the prosecutor anyway. Throughout the entire piece, I kept my head down even though I could feel the eyes of the jury on me. I looked up at Paul and Laura a couple of times, and Laura gave me a brief smile at one point, but that was the only positive thing about the whole day.
By Friday lunchtime, I’d had enough. The prosecutor had just finished describing the moment that the original jury had come back with their guilty verdict. It was about the most animated that she’d been for the entire week, and about the only time she showed any degree of showmanship. I guessed that for the rest of the week she hadn’t felt the need to, but on Friday morning, she put on an affronted air as she told the new jurors how their predecessors had found me guilty. Not only had they found they me guilty, she told the new jury, but the verdict was unanimous.
Blind Justice Page 22
