The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  There was silence on the line. Then a voice said indignantly, ‘Why didn’t you let us know sooner?’ ‘Well,’ I said carefully, not wishing to get off on the wrong foot with the Old Bailey bailiff, ‘I wasn’t aware that I would have a bad back until I had it. Which was today. That’s why I’m ringing you.’ Another silence. I suppose people try this kind of thing on all the time, I thought. There was a sound of paper rustling. Perhaps he was looking up the Juries Act 1974 in Archbold’s Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice. Eventually he spoke through what sounded like gritted teeth. ‘If you can’t come in Monday you must send us a doctor’s certificate, first thing.’

  There didn’t seem any point in explaining that if I could not get out of bed on Monday morning I would not be able to get to the doctor’s either, so I simply said I would do my best. In the event, I made it. At 9.30 a.m. on 18 November I hobbled up to the Old Bailey entrance clutching my jury summons.

  There was a queue stretching a good way along the pavement. As we were to learn, there is a queue every Monday morning when the courts are sitting, as this is induction day for each new batch of jurors. There must have been fifty or more of us shuffling slowly past the glass-fronted noticeboard that lists the day’s business in the Old Bailey’s eighteen courtrooms. In one court, I noticed, half-a-dozen defendants, mostly with Irish surnames, were being tried together. Later we would learn that flak-jacketed policemen were an even surer sign that a terrorist trial was in progress.

  The main entrance to the Old Bailey is a splendid example of Edwardian baroque: solid, dignified and slightly ludicrous. Seated stonily over the porch are the figures of three large women. The one in the middle is wearing a shawl over her head and staring gloomily into her lap. She is meant to be the Recording Angel although the sculptor, Frederick William Pomeroy, seems to have mislaid her wings, which could explain her despondency. On her right is Fortitude, in a sort of Lawrence of Arabia head-dress. She is holding a short, fat sword and looking intently up at the Recording Angel awaiting orders. On the other side lounges a young lady whose dress has tumbled to her waist, revealing her bosom. This is Truth. She must have been a beauty in her prime. Alas, she has lost her nose, which may be why, instead of gazing up at the Recording Angel like Fortitude, she is staring moodily into a hand-held mirror.

  It would have lent to the drama of our first day as jurors had we been able to enter the building beneath the skirts of this allegorical trio. While we were waiting, we could also have studied the inscription carved above their heads: ‘Defend the children of the poor & punish the wrongdoer.’ That would have given us something to think about. It is from one of the Psalms but sounds more like a command from on high directed at faint-hearted jurors. Defend! Punish!

  But the Grand Entrance is nowadays used only four times a year, when the Lord Mayor drops in ceremoniously. Otherwise, all the comings and goings of the court are via the squat doorway of the modern 1970s annexe, whose packed lobby I had now reached.

  Even without the throng of first-day jurors, getting into the Old Bailey is a slow process. Once a uniformed officer has checked your credentials everyone has to go through a Perspex cylinder like an air-lock, one by one: Queen’s Counsels must take their turn alongside defendants on bail and even common-or-garden jurors. Loose change and keys go into a plastic tray, bags through an X-ray machine and yourself through an airport-style metal detector.

  On top of the X-ray machine there is always a fair-sized scrapheap consisting entirely of bunches of keys. There must be thirty or forty of them. These belong to people who have forgotten to collect them from the little trays after going through the metal detector. Do all these absent-minded barristers, witnesses and jurymen not notice they are missing something when they try to get into their homes in the evening? In the four months that I underwent this daily routine, the size of the pile never varied. The policeman lounging by the X-ray screen looked up from his copy of the Sun and agreed that it was rather droll, but did so in the weary tones of one who had seen everything and to whom no human foible came as a surprise. Staring at the X-rayed contents of people’s briefcases all day can do this to a man.

  We were told to take the lift to the fifth floor and assemble in the jury restaurant. The place looked like the waiting room of a fogbound provincial airport. It was packed. There must have been getting on for three hundred people. All the easy chairs were occupied. So were the rows of canteen-style tables. Those of us who could not find a seat milled about, queued at the coffee urn or read the security notices on the walls. There was a distinct feeling of apprehension in the air. Not many people were talking. Those who were, I guessed, were already on serving juries, waiting to be called down to court. They chatted or played cards, eyeing the rest of us with the disdain of war-weary veterans.

  There was an airport-like ding-dong on the Tannoy. The bailiff had come into the room and was addressing the rookies. As soon as Adi opened his mouth I realised he was the fellow who had been so disgruntled about my call on Friday. We were to go down to Court 1 to be shown a video, he said bossily. And off we trooped, like overgrown children on our way to school assembly.

  Number 1 Court is not only the most famous courtroom in the world; it also looks the part. It is woody and leathery and intimidating. Its oak-panelled walls have echoed to the voices of the finest advocates of the century. Dr Crippen stood in this very dock and heard the black-capped judge pronounce his death sentence from that very bench. Now the place was swarming with men in jeans and women piling their Marks & Spencer’s macs among bundles of documents on the ushers’ table. The paraphernalia of a trial in progress – cardboard boxes, foolscap pads and bulging binders – were scattered about the court. We sat or leant where we could and Adi set the video going on a TV set up by the judge’s chair.

  The video was a well-put-together account of what jurors are supposed to do and not do. Doubtless it is intended to be reassuring as well as informative, just as those emergency-procedure videos which have replaced the human cabin crew on aeroplanes are meant to be. But whereas most airline passengers are blasé about escape chutes and life jacket toggles, all this stuff about juries was alarmingly new. We listened intently. We were told about taking the oath and about our responsibilities in court and jury room. We were instructed how to collect our expenses and put in for loss of earnings.

  Some of it was distinctly daunting. Do not talk to a soul about what you are doing, other than your fellow-jurors on the case (even that is discouraged on American juries). Be careful about whom you speak to in local bars and cafés near the court. ‘It is a Contempt of Court, which may be punishable by imprisonment, to obtain, disclose, or solicit any opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast by jurors in the course of their deliberations … It is also important that you tell the Court Usher immediately should anyone outside your jury approach you about the case or try to influence you about it.’ We filed out of Court 1 feeling even more nervous than before, keeping a sharp look-out for furtive jury-nobblers.

  The scene in the jury restaurant had grown calmer. The serving jurors had gone. The newcomers settled down for a morning of reading newspapers and magazines or simply staring into space. I counted twenty-two broadsheet newspapers, the Guardian and Independent narrowly outnumbering The Times and the Telegraph. Not an FT in sight. Copies of the Sun were lying about everywhere. Otherwise honours were evenly divided between the Mail, Mirror and the Express. I could see only four people with books. Staring into space was easily the most popular occupation.

  My fellow jurors seemed to be mostly young, mostly white, with a scattering of grey heads and black or brown faces. The men by and large were dressed as though they were off to Ibiza or the betting shop. There was scarcely a tie to be seen. Many wore trainers. Such is the modern male’s blokeish terror of appearing respectable. The women were altogether smarter and less ill-at-ease.

  Court dress is a subject people lecture you on the minute you tell them you are going to be doing jury servic
e. These knowing types all tell you exactly the same thing, although you would think from their manner they were imparting some dark masonic secret. What they tell you is that if you want to get off, which of course they assume you do, you must go into court wearing a suit and tie and carrying the Times or Telegraph. This will infallibly signal that you are a well-educated, conservative, law-and-order sort of chap to the defence counsel, who will promptly exercise one of his three peremptory challenges and boot you out of the jury box.

  The trouble with this engaging piece of folk wisdom is that it is wrong: in this country the defence has not had the right to exercise a peremptory challenge for more than a decade – although in theory but seldom in practice the prosecution can still ‘stand by’ someone it considers an unsuitable juror. Twenty-one years ago, up to seven jurors per defendant could be challenged ‘without cause’. John Mortimer remembers a case where he and his fellow defence counsel had forty-nine potential challenges between them (he was persuaded not to challenge a tie-wearing Telegraph-reader, because the man had been spotted winking in a friendly manner at the defendants – only to discover too late that the man had a facial tic). In 1977 the maximum number of challenges dropped to three. Since 1988 it is none at all. The only way for the defence to reject a juror is ‘for cause’, i.e. by showing there is valid reason such as that a juror is the prosecuting counsel’s cousin. Not even a Savile Row pinstripe and a Guards tie would qualify under that heading.

  All the same, there were were four men wearing suits in the jury restaurant, looking smug. And, yes, two of them were scanning The Times; a third was doing the Telegraph crossword. What was the fourth planning to carry into court under his arm, I wondered – a copy of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs? Sure enough, within a couple of days of realising the ruse was redundant, the suits had disappeared.

  Every half an hour or so Adi or another bailiff would read out a list of names, to which those called had to respond in school rollcall fashion. Some names sounded Asian or East European, over which the bailiffs occasionally stumbled, but most were recognisably British. These people were then assigned a court and led away, chattering uneasily, not so much like sheep to the slaughter, if you came to think of it, as slaughterers to the sheep.

  Lunchtime came and went and my name had still not been called. I found a seat by the windows which, a notice warned, would trigger alarms if you tried to open them. Perhaps some desperate juror for whom the suit-and-Times trick hadn’t worked had once escaped across the rooftops. I was deep into the latest Patrick O’Brian novel and had no desire to escape. At Southwark Crown Court ten years earlier I had got through two books between cases besides Oscar and Lucinda. One of them was Bleak House. Dickens’s lampooning of the convolutions of the courts made an excellent homeopathic antidote to points-of-law fatigue. This is an affliction to which jurors rapidly succumb, when they are repeatedly sent out of court so that arcane legal matters can be discussed behind their backs – pas devant les jurés.

  The introductory video makes it quite plain that there will be lots of hanging about. ‘You may find it helps to pass the time if you bring something with you to do,’ it warns, and then kindly offers some suggestions, ‘for example, a book to read, crosswords or knitting.’ It was extraordinary how few jurors seemed inclined to take this advice. You could buy a pack of cards in the restaurant. There was also a shoe-box containing half-a-dozen books for jurors to borrow, all of which apart from a well-thumbed Ngaio Marsh were of the ‘a turbulent epic of love and guilt’ variety. But why no one has been enterprising enough to open the Old Bailey Bookshop on the premises is a puzzle. Perhaps the horrid truth is that there’s no call for it. I didn’t see anyone knitting either.

  The Tannoy ding-donged. Adi read out a very long list of names, including my own. When he finished, he told us to go down to Court 9. But there was something odd going on. Most of the groups called down to other courts during the day had numbered fifteen or sixteen people. Yet there seemed to be at least sixty of us cramming into the lifts and clattering down the stairs to the third floor.

  I am not clear how we all managed to fit into Court 9, but we did. It was far smaller and less impressive than Number 1 Court, and it was three-quarters full already. As we poured in, what seemed like dozens of bewigged heads turned towards us from the well of the court. The judge stared gravely down. We squeezed in anywhere we could. It was only then that I noticed the dock. It too was packed. There seemed to be at least a dozen men up there. It looked like Nuremberg without the headphones.

  Something was definitely up. Was it a fraud trial, as some of the jurors were whispering, one of those cases that would last half a year and end in an acquittal brought on by evidential overload? This was a fate I dreaded. The only clue I could gather was a label on a box file where I spotted two names: Mereu, Jean-Marc and Moussaoui, Djemel. It would be an odd sort of fraud trial which included a Frenchman and someone who appeared to be an Arab.

  What followed was interesting and entertaining but still provided no clue as to what was afoot. First the judge explained that the trial set to take place in this courtroom would be an unusually long one. Most only take a few days. This one was likely to last at least until 20 January 1997, with a break for Christmas. The reason for the panel being so large was that many of us might have a good reason for avoiding a long trial, and that would whittle the numbers down. Also, he said, anyone who had family or work connections with the police should disclose them and would be stood down. What he planned to do now, he went on, leaving us no time to digest this tantalising information, was to find a total of twenty-four people available to serve, of whom twelve would eventually be sworn.

  The clerk of the court had a fat wodge of cards in front of her. At random she picked one and read out the name on it. The person called had to state in a voice loud enough to be heard whether he or she could be a member of this jury. Those who answered yes had nothing more to worry about at this point. But if you could not, you had to approach the bench and tell the court why. Again I was put in mind of some arcane rite of passage from one’s schooldays. The judge seemed to be the kindliest of men, but it was plain that some of those who wanted to put forward an excuse found doing so in front of a room full of strangers awkward. One trembling middle-aged woman murmured something about her child-minder; another was a child-minder. Someone was related to a policeman. There was an extraordinary hat-trick of postmen. The judge chuckled appreciatively: even the judiciary, celebrated for its ignorance of the modern world, knows about the Christmas postal rush. They were let off. So was a woman with a disabled mother. Then, to mounting hilarity, came more postmen, bringing the total so far to six – a tenth of the panel.

  And of course there were those who had booked their winter holidays. Should one have been surprised that it was invariably the types who had been reading the broadsheets upstairs who were off to the snow and sun? Of course not. But wasn’t it rather galling that, of all the reasons offered for being unable to serve as jurors, this was the one that got the most automatic acceptance from the judge? A quick, understanding nod and off they went back upstairs, to be picked for a nice short trial which would leave them plenty of time to pack for St Moritz or Morocco. It looked like a fix and in some ways it is a fix. The better off you are, the more likely it is that you will have some pressing reason for skipping jury service, be it a chalet in Chamonix or a business trip to Bolivia. And who could be more sympathetic to such pleas than a well-paid lawyer, that cynosure of the professional middle classes?

  Sure enough, once we were a few days into our jury service proper, the twenty-two quality newspaper readers I had counted among our first-day intake had been whittled down to half-a-dozen. It is an old story and a disreputable one. How ironic it is that the middle classes, so apt to boast about avoiding jury service, are invariably its chief detractors.

  My name was called. For the sake of form I attempted a half-hearted excuse about being a self-employed writer. The judge did not buy it, thou
gh he added, ‘Don’t worry. It may never happen.’ I was relieved, really. I could have come forward with a full-hearted excuse, the one any journalist can use with near-certain results, which is to say that one’s work has brought one into close contact with the police. But I felt like leaving the decision to fate. By now there was an A team of a dozen potential jurors. I was on the B team. Now, said the judge, we twenty-four were to go home, consult our families about the feasibility of serving in a long trial, and return the following Monday, when the actual jury would be empanelled. I was suddenly rather keen to be on it.

  SWEARING IN

  A week had passed. We were back in Court 9. Today the clerk had only twenty-four cards on her desk. ‘Members of the jury in waiting,’ said the usher, ‘will you answer to your name and step into the box as your name is called?’ Gradually the jury box filled up. Several members of the A team were allowed to drop out now that they had had time to think about the implications. One said his wife had just told him she was having a baby. The reservists took their places in the box. We reached Juror No. 10. I cannot remember what Juror No. 10’s problem was, but it convinced the judge. I heard my name read out and walked self-consciously across the court to take her place: second row, last but two on the left. No. 11 and No. 12 said they could serve. The jury was complete and ready to be sworn.

  It is not obligatory to swear. Since the Oaths Act of 1888 agnostics and atheists have been allowed to affirm. Muslims may swear by Allah, Hindus by Gita and Sikhs by Guru Nanak. In our case, we all took our oaths one by one in the traditional manner, standing up and holding the Bible in the right hand: ‘I swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendants and give a true verdict according to the evidence.’