by Trevor Grove
I would like to have used some of the extra lolly to buy George a drink. Not because I was a hundred per cent convinced he was telling the truth or out of sympathy for what he was undergoing in the witness box, where the next defence barrister had now taken over the pummelling, but simply because he cut such a lonely figure. Witnesses may talk to no one about the case while they are in the box – unlike the defendants, who were having constant tête-à-têtes with their solicitors. Not only did George have to keep clear of the lawyers; he could not even unburden himself to his nearest and dearest, who would themselves be giving evidence.
George was the only one of us, save possibly the judge, who had no one to chat to in the coffee-breaks or share a fag with, no one to take to lunch or go home to in the evenings. He was in purdah. When one of the defence barristers concluded his cross-examination by saying nastily, ‘You are a cheat with a T and cheap with a P,’ George had to suffer in solitary silence. One day he announced brokenly, ‘I feel that every time I get out of this court I have just given birth.’ Then he added with a tight smile, ‘To twins!’
Eventually it was all over. The judge released him, thanked him, and let him know that he could now rejoin the human race. George had been in the witness box for eleven days. He climbed down, looking sad and tired. It would be many weeks before we were to see him again.
We wondered who the next witness would be. There were many, many more to come, the usher had warned us. How on earth would we know which of them to believe? In everyday life it is normal and polite to take what people say at face value. Here in court it was our job to be aware that every witness was a potential perjurer. From what they told us, we twelve had to decide on the facts of the case. But of course if the facts were straightforward, this trial would not even be taking place.
DO JURIES WORK?
There is an immense amount of research into the efficacy of juries as finders-out of the truth. None of it is conclusive. How could it be? There is no way of measuring the correctness or otherwise of a verdict with a hundred per cent accuracy. There have been painstaking projects to assess how far judges agree with their juries’ decisions, likewise barristers and the police. One might suppose that where judge and jury were in accord one could describe a verdict as correct. But what if there were a successful appeal based on fresh evidence, say, or proof of misconduct by the police? Notorious miscarriages of justice occur with depressing regularity. Such verdicts would by definition have been incorrect. But who could blame the jury?
Tests have been made with mock juries, sometimes sitting in parallel with real ones. The results have been intriguing, but of course such experiments can only approximate the tension and the tedium of the real thing. There are whole libraries of material based on post-trial interviews with jurors in the United States, where such research is allowed. In this country even the most anonymous probing into how jurors reach their verdicts is strictly forbidden. Any doubt on this score was firmly scotched under Section 8 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, after a juror wrote the inside story of the Jeremy Thorpe trial in the New Statesman. Since then, although jurors do not swear an oath to stay silent, they are liable to prosecution if they do not. So is anyone who tries to persuade them to reveal the secrets of the retiring room. A Royal Commission recommendation in 1993 that this restriction should be lifted for the purposes of academic study was not acted upon. And even in the US, where almost anything goes and interviews with jurymen on the very steps of the courthouse are commonplace, the taping or filming of deliberations in the jury room itself is not permitted.
I think the complete lifting of this ban would be a bad idea, though it goes against the journalistic grain not to want to know more. Verdicts must not only be unassailable: they have to be seen to be so, other than through the appeals mechanism (even then, it is not the quality of the verdict that is under review but the fairness and correctness of the trial that led to it). Likewise jurors should not have to worry about being mocked or menaced by having their conduct in the jury room exposed in the newspapers.
My own guess is that even the most thorough investigations would fail to answer any of the great questions about juries beyond reasonable doubt. All the same, not to allow properly monitored, anonymity-preserving, carefully targeted academic research seems unnecessarily defensive. Belief in the jury system is an act of communal faith and political will. But if mystique is all it has going for it, we should be worried.
The history of the English jury is blotted with hair-raising stories of jurors playing pitch and toss or ‘hustling halfpennies in a hat’ to reach a verdict. There has been a recent case where some members of a jury consulted an ouija board. Every lawyer can tell you anecdotes about deaf, drunk or disqualified people sitting on juries. Nevertheless, it is broadly correct that in England and Wales most judges and most lawyers – even most of the police – accept that juries are reasonably reliable assessors of the facts.
An even greater majority would agree that whatever their reservations on that score, the system confers a unique legitimacy on the judicial process. As a distinguished prosecuting counsel put it to me, ‘The strongest argument for the retention of the jury is that it is the only involvement the public has in the criminal justice system. Confidence in our system may not be high: it would be reduced even further if it were left to lawyers and judges alone.’ The jury-less Diplock courts that have been imposed on Northern Ireland since 1973 for fear of prejudice and intimidation have worked extraordinarily well, I am told. But they are a symptom of a deeply troubled society and are tolerated by the community only so long as there is no alternative.
About a quarter of contested Crown Court trials in England and Wales end in acquittals. That may seem rather a high proportion, given that the Crown Prosecution Service is supposed to proceed only with cases that have a good chance of a conviction. But for the record, a senior British judge, Lord Salmon, said in 1974, ‘I do not believe that… there is more than about two per cent of the men brought to trial who are wrongly acquitted.’ Other judges put the figure higher – but no one can say with any certainty what the proportion really is.
Most American judges claim to be broadly in favour of juries and confident that verdicts are overwhelmingly correct. Although there is a large element of motherhood and apple pie in all this, academic studies here, too, have tended to support the view that perverse jury verdicts are rare. Jury Trials (OUP, 1979), an analysis by John Baldwin and Michael McConville of hundreds of cases tried in Birmingham and London in the mid-1970s, did come up with some disturbing statistics – for example, they identified forty-one out of a hundred and fourteen acquittals in Birmingham as questionable, and there was a significant though much smaller proportion of dubious convictions. (The ratio of questionable verdicts was lower in London.) None of their research led them to any clear explanation for this anomaly, other than that ‘trial by jury is a relatively crude instrument’. But Baldwin and McConville do declare emphatically that ‘there was no evidence … to suggest any relationship between the composition of the jury and the verdict returned’.
That information might have been a comfort to George Fraghistas had he known it. Our twelve faces staring at him across the court must have unnerved him. I am sure that at times we looked stupid or confused, at others merely expressionless. He would have seen one or two of us nod off. At any rate, very little about our appearance can have inspired him with confidence.
GEORGE’S MOTHER
Rhea Fraghistas took her son’s place in the witness box on Friday 13 December. She was a slim, well-groomed, quietly dressed woman who I guessed was in her late sixties. She had obviously been even prettier when she was young. She had bluey-grey hair and a calm face – not at all the grim-visaged shipping tycooness I had been half-expecting. This was going to be a problem for the defending counsel: if they bully this nice-looking elderly lady, I said to myself, the jury will say boo.
We settled back with the anticipation of a theatre audience, hoping to
learn more about George by observing his mother. Joanna Korner took her through a set of questions which quickly challenged the defence’s insinuations that there was friction among the Fraghistas clan. ‘We are a very united family,’ said Mrs Fraghistas firmly. ‘In Greece, most families are very close. That is the rule rather than the exception.’ She left hanging in the air the unspoken suggestion that perhaps this was not the case in Britain.
‘If George wanted some money, what happened?’ asked Miss Korner.
‘I would give it to him. The same with all my children. And sometimes George would send me money.’ Bang went any idea – for the moment at any rate – that George would normally have a problem extracting funds from his mama. Yes, she knew George gambled. No, she did not approve. No, she had never given him money to pay off his casino debts. And if he had asked for help of that kind? ‘I would probably have given it to him. He is my son. But I would have made conditions.’
‘Such as stopping?’
‘Of course, stopping.’
Mr Gale used his cross-examination to search for a breach in this solid maternal wall. ‘In England, if one company lent money to another, it would have to show up in the books,’ he said.
‘But this was Greece, not England. As I said, we are a family.’ replied the witness patiently.
Once again, one was aware of the cultural dissonance resonating around Court 9. Mr Gale found it impossible to picture a business, even a family business, which allowed its directors to shovel large sums of money from one member to another as the need arose without accounting for every penny. Mrs Fraghistas seemed to find it equally puzzling that these English lawyers couldn’t imagine such an amiable and relaxed state of affairs. It was put to her that perhaps George would have been scared to come to her for money to cover gambling debts, had he known she would try to put an end to his bad habits. No, she didn’t think so.
‘But, Mrs Fraghistas, you agree that you told the police he was a naughty boy …’
She said she was referring to when he was a boy – a naughty little boy.
The judge intervened: ‘Mr Gale, Mr Fraghistas is 43.’
Mrs Fraghistas told Mr Gale she thought it very unlikely that George would go back to his old ways at the tables after his recent experience.
She left the courtroom looking desolate. Mr Gale’s closing shot of the day had been to inform her that George had been back to the Clermont to gamble, since the kidnap. Did she know that, asked the sneak of the Bailey triumphantly? No she did not, she had said, crestfallen.
I doubt if I was alone in liking Rhea Fraghistas. I heard a woman juror say, ‘I wish she was my mother.’ The transcripts of telephone conversations between George in the cupboard and Nicos at his mother’s flat showed that Rhea was ill with anxiety during the kidnap. Could George really have put her through this deliberately, as the defence alleged? She said with complete conviction, ‘My children always try not to worry me.’ She could be quite funny. Asked to describe the family business she began, ‘If you will now listen to some shipping information …’ Challenged to admit that her late husband had played poker with a certain Greek minister she said with a shrug of her shoulders, ‘My husband played poker with half of Athens.’
Her English was fluent. She very seldom turned for help to the interpreter seated beside her in the witness box. She stood her ground in a way that must have pleased Joanna Korner and her junior, Jeremy Benson.
‘Does George have an account in Geneva?’
‘Ask George,’ replied his mother.
‘But I thought you were a very united family?’
‘Yes, but we are not in each other’s pockets.’
The barrage did not slacken. Did she ever think that the kidnap was a fake? Never. Did she believe that George was really in debt? No. Why not? Because if he’d really been in debt he would have come to her for money. ‘As I have said, we are a family’
The judge leaned towards her kindly when she had finished. ‘You are now free to talk to your son. You can have dinner with George and talk to him about anything you like, including this case.’ His thoughtfulness did not go unnoticed. She had been an impressive witness. She had done all that a mother could for her son.
Exactly, a sceptical juror might have reflected. Even if George had been trying to terrify her into parting with millions of dollars, and even if she had suspected him all along, she was just the sort of mother who would have stood by him, wasn’t she? She would have wanted to protect the family name, wouldn’t she?
SCENES OF THE CRIME
Before Mrs Fraghistas took the stand the jury had done something which made us feel rather bold. We had asked to visit the scenes of the crime – the kidnap HQ at Hogan Mews and the Lanark Road car-park where George had been seized. This would be arranged, said the judge, making it sound as though jury tours of kidnap hideouts were all part of the Old Bailey service.
The jurors were very excited about the jaunt. Here was a chance to put the courtroom narrative with which we were now so familiar into a three-dimensional context. Bob the postman saw this trip as raising the whole status of our task. A jury being escorted to the mise en scène was serious stuff. He was now quite confident that our deliberations at the end of the trial would take days rather than hours. We would therefore have to be sequestered in a hotel for several nights. He grinned significantly at Kate as he explained this. Juries were always sent to top-grade hotels, he said. He hoped ours would have a gym, so he could keep up his training. Several jurors began discussing what they should pack on the morning we began our deliberations – just in case we were cut off from the world without a toothbrush and a nightie.
All this seemed a bit premature. Several of us were appalled at the idea of extending our enforced intimacy in an almost certainly gymless hostelry, probably somewhere out on the M25. But the idea took hold and remained a potent lure for the rest of the trial.
The expedition to Hogan Mews and Lanark Road took place on a Monday morning. When we trooped into court there was no one there except the judge and the clerk, both dressed in mufti. We were warned not to talk to a soul except the usher from now on. One almost expected to be told to walk in a crocodile, holding hands.
The jury was led out of the back of the Old Bailey into a yard where a full-sized tourist coach awaited. We spread ourselves around the interior in a suppressed holiday mood, feeling foolishly outnumbered by empty seats. We left a large space between ourselves and the judge. He sat near the front in a natty overcoat looking rather small away from his dais and bereft of his paraphernalia.
Forty minutes later it was plain we were lost. Although both Lanark Road and Hogan Mews are clearly marked in the London street maps, we were way off target. I could hear the judge giving the driver some unconvincing instructions. Considering that His Honour Judge Goldstein was near enough a local man, as I had discovered from Who’s Who, living quite close to our destinations, this was slightly disconcerting. Was someone incapable of finding his way around his own neighbourhood the best man to go into the legal jungle with?
I murmured as loudly as I dared from the back of the bus that we ought to be going the other way. Stuart, the one-man A-Z, joined in. The judge, the clerk and even the driver pretended not to hear. The usher, looking a bit flummoxed, checked whether we jurors really knew the way. There then ensued an A.A. Milne-ish parody of English judicial procedure in which I told the usher, the usher told the clerk, the clerk told the judge and the judge told the driver which way to turn. The driver, understandably sceptical of all this palaver, eventually stopped the coach and went to ask directions. By then Hogan Mews was just around the corner.
We turned down a quiet street from the Regent’s Canal in Little Venice, where the narrow boats are moored. The entrance to Hogan Mews is just off Porteous Road, opposite a characterless eight-storey estate called John Aird Court. It was rather a glum little mews, no more than fifty yards long, consisting of identical small town houses. I saw Neighbourhood Watch stickers in tw
o windows, but only one burglar alarm.
There was a gaggle of overcoated lawyers waiting for us outside Number 5. Michael Gale was wearing a bowler hat, which the jury thought hilarious. He looked like a character from one of the late Jak’s cartoons in the Evening Standard. Where else has one seen a bowler hat in situ in the last twenty years except in the vicinity of the racetrack? Miss Korner must also have been uneasy at going about wigless. She was splendidly decked in a brown velvet Mabel Lucie Attwell creation.
We surged into the house, retracing the steps of Detective Sergeant Hawkins and his men seven months earlier. Immediately to the left was the downstairs lavatory into which Mereu had been shoved. It had a tiny window, which none of us noticed, but whose size would eventually become an issue of some significance. Ahead was the kitchen, now a good deal tidier than in the police video. The door to the cupboard-cum-utility room off the kitchen was open: it looked even smaller and more cell-like than I had expected. Only one of us could get in there at a time to inspect it.
This was the airless hole where George had expected to meet his death. He said he had begged ‘Petros’ if ‘he could kindly use a gun while I sleep instead of a lethal injection. And he agreed, which put me at rest a little bit’. Towards the end of his ordeal ‘Petros’ terrified him by saying that the guards had grown to like him and wouldn’t be prepared to kill him – so Mereu and Moussaoui were to be replaced.
A tall black man was lounging in the sitting room upstairs, presumably the present tenant or maybe the landlord. He was trying to look indifferent to this weird invasion of besuited swells and jean-clad jurymen. We poked about like house-hunters, our numbers emphasising the smallness of the place as we squeezed past each other on the stairs, scrummed into the bathroom and peered over each other’s shoulders into box-like bedrooms. ‘It’s really naff,’ whispered Kate. ‘I couldn’t bring up my family in a place like this,’ Anna said scornfully. The jury seemed rather chuffed that the mews-dwelling classes lived in such cramped soullessness.
