The Juryman's Tale

by Trevor Grove

  Evidence-driven deliberation, by contrast, is what we planned to do: going back over all the main points made by the Crown and the defence, before eventually focusing on the accused and the indictments. All the same, I felt it would help to get us going if we could gauge, very roughly, which way each of us was leaning: however cautiously, was it towards guilty, towards not guilty or in neither direction at this stage? We went round the table. All I can say is that the outcome was absolutely inconclusive. In other words, there was a lot of work for everyone to do. For the rest of that Friday we were hard at it.

  No two jury deliberations can be the same. But the accounts in Members of the Jury suggest that there are some common features. Anthony Barker, for example, found jurors reluctant to give even a provisional view until they had heard what others thought. He noted a strong feeling that the jury wanted to prolong the discussion to let people know they had done their duty fully and so as ‘to get their psychological money’s worth from being on the jury’. He also wrote about the difficulties presented by ‘the binary system of British justice’, where everything seemed to boil down to ‘Did he or didn’t he?’

  The phrase ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ was not an easy idea for many people to grasp. As John Mellors said in the same book: ‘There must be reasonable doubt if you can construct another theory’ for what happened – which is exactly what the defence normally sets out to do. (I was struck with a related thought: our system allows majority verdicts, yet a majority verdict is one which by definition has raised a reasonable doubt … ‘I’m not asking anyone to accept it,’ argues the 8th Juror in the most famous of all jury dramas, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. ‘I’m just saying that it’s possible.’)

  Another ex-juror, Harry Cohen, reflected on the reluctance of some jurors to reach a judgement. One of the strongest reasons for people wanting to get off jury service, he found, was ‘a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy’ and ‘resentment that they were being forced to … decide whether a man should go to prison or remain free’. He summed up their feelings as ‘It shouldn’t be left to the likes of us to make decisions of this kind.’ Or as the 6th Juror in Twelve Angry Men puts it, ‘I’m not used to supposing. I’m just a working man. My boss does the supposing.’

  Anthony Barker also mentioned a dilemma which I had to cope with myself. He did not want to be chosen foreman ‘because he might be expected by the others to be only an impartial chairman and counter of heads, whereas I wanted to be in on any arguments’. I reasoned that while the foreman should be impartial so far as conducting the discussion was concerned, he was as entitled to express his view as the next juror – indeed was obliged to do so, while making it clear that his view carried no more weight than anybody else’s.

  That evening we were sent home for the weekend, button-lipped, verdictless and unusually despondent.

  We met again in Jury Room J on Monday morning. It was 24 March – the anniversary of George Fraghistas’s alleged kidnap. We had all found it impossible not to brood about the trial over the weekend. I had gone so far as to spend Sunday morning typing out a detailed checklist of points in the Crown’s favour, set against those in the defence’s. My plan had been to print out a copy for each of my colleagues, but I became worried that this might be some sort of breach of the rules. What were the rules for a jury sent home for the weekend in mid-deliberation? I rang a friend who is a judge. The minute I mentioned the word ‘jury’ he snapped as tight-shut as an oyster. He simply could not talk to me about anything to do with a deliberating jury, however innocuous – and he put the phone down. I decided not to take my list into court. I memorised it instead.

  Outside the sun shone. Inside, our room had now become thoroughly squalid. No cleaners would be allowed in until we had reached our verdicts. The ashtrays were full. The wastepaper baskets spilt over with plastic cups and empty Coke cans. Binders rose in heaps all over the table and floor. A century or so earlier we might have been starved into hastening our verdicts. Things were not much better now. One might have thought the tax-payer would lay on a decent lunch for twelve citizens selflessly performing their public duty. Not a bit of it. The only available victuals were sandwiches fetched from the jury restaurant by the ushers, for which we had to pay cash in advance. One day there were no cheese-and-pickle sarnies, another no apples. They even ran out of milk.

  Our only proper break was a ten-minute stroll inside the high walls of a yard at the rear of the Old Bailey where the Sheriff of London parks his Rolls. Guarded by two ushers, we walked around in a glum circle, like exercising prisoners.

  At the end of the day we were taken back into the courtroom. I watched the faces as I told the judge that we had not reached a verdict. Joanna Korner looked astonished. The defence counsel appeared relieved. I did not look at the men in the dock.

  Tuesday: somehow we remained good-tempered. The excitement of our first day’s deliberations had quite vanished. The discussion was extraordinarily tiring. We went back over certain items of evidence again and again, with a patience I think we all found surprising. Nerves frayed but did not snap. No one said, oh to hell with it, let’s take a vote and get out of here. There was an unspoken agreement that the moment had not yet arrived.

  On Wednesday we ate slices of my daughter’s twenty-first birthday cake, drank proper coffee from the thermoses we had learned to bring in with us, and sent for a new exhibit to examine. By now we had been instructed by the judge that we could return a majority verdict. Oddly enough, that did not really relieve the pressure. I think by this time we had all inwardly decided that we owed it to everyone concerned, not least ourselves, to try to be unanimous. That morning we experienced our first – and only – outbreak of inter-juror anger. There were heated words. Quite soon, however, tempers cooled and those concerned apologised to each other.

  We sent a question in to the judge, seeking clarification about the exact meaning of the indictments. He was at lunch. We were allowed to parade around the yard while we awaited his answer. Just after two o’clock we were hustled back into the courtroom where to our relief the judge spelt out exactly what we wanted to know.

  We returned to our room. There was no further conversation. By a sort of murmured accord we agreed to vote. Very solemnly I went round the table asking each juror in turn for his or her verdict on each of the three indictments against each of the four defendants. They answered quietly, almost breathlessly. The whole procedure must have taken a quarter of an hour at least. Eventually, everyone had spoken. After deliberating for fifteen hours and fifty-five minutes we were unanimous on every count.

  We sat back in silence, overawed by what had just occurred. Then the tension suddenly ebbed. Someone joked that we should withhold our decision and pretend to be deadlocked until after Easter, so that we could earn a few extra quid. We spent a few moments planning what to do after the verdict – drinks at McGovern’s across the road. We agreed, also unanimously, that we should invite Roy the usher. We had already clubbed together to buy him a present. I wrote a note to the judge, saying that we had reached our verdicts, and asked someone to press the bell.

  THE VERDICT

  Shortly after three in the afternoon, we entered the jury box in Court 5 for the last time, with our hearts pounding. The clerk of the court was on her feet, turned sideways in her place to look directly at me. Behind and above her, the judge looked narrowly down at us. I was asked to stand.

  Twelve times Sarah stared hard into my eyes and asked me for our verdict, prisoner by prisoner, count by count. Twelve times I stared back and heard my answer – ‘Guilty’ – ring eerily around the court, silent but for the sound of George Fraghistas sobbing on his mother’s shoulder.

  And were these the verdicts of us all?

  They were.

  Once the verdicts were delivered, the atmosphere changed dramatically. The moment of truth for a jury that has delivered a guilty verdict is when the prosecuting counsel tells the court about the defendant’s antecedents – the ‘prev
ious’ which under English law is normally hidden from the jury and had certainly been kept from us. Were we right? Was Korkolis really the criminal that we had decided, beyond reasonable doubt, he was?

  Joanna Korner got lankily to her feet and put the missing bits of the jigsaw into place. Constantinos Korkolis was not the innocent businessman he had tried to lead us to believe. He was not the dupe of another man’s betrayal. He had a long and murky criminal record in his home country.

  The judge intervened. The jury, he said ringingly, had been the victims of a monstrous deception about Korkolis’s true character. It was a moment of the most intense relief, a vindication. We could breathe again.

  Even the defence barristers suddenly sounded matter-of-fact about their clients’ guilt, merely asking for their previously unblemished records to be reflected in the sentences. But My Lord was in no mood for leniency. He looked thunderous. The transfiguration was extraordinary. Gone was the tolerant and courteous figure, joking about the courtroom being hot enough to grow grapes in. He addressed the four prisoners with a sudden, steely ferocity, in tones of pent-up condemnation. ‘The crime of kidnapping for ransom is, after murder, the vilest, foulest crime known to the English criminal law … None of you can expect any mercy whatsoever.’

  He stared hard at Korkolis. ‘You are probably the most evil and dreadful man I have ever met. I have the gravest doubts whether Mr Fraghistas would ever have got out of this alive.’ The defendants deserved no mercy, he said chillingly. He would show them none.

  He sentenced Korkolis to prison for twenty-five years. It was the longest sentence ever imposed for such a crime in this country. The other three men would each serve sixteen.

  ‘Take them down!’

  The drama that had engrossed us for so long had reached its climax. The seriousness of our role had been underlined by the severity of the sentences. Our part was now complete. Again there was that sense of an enormous tension suddenly released.

  Judge Goldstein put off his frown. He turned to the jury. He was his benign lordship once again. He thanked us warmly, saying that what we had done was overwhelmingly worthwhile. Then he gave us a reward for our diligence: it was a fifteen-year exemption from having to do jury service again. We smiled back at him, feeling proud and pleased. Some of the jurors, I think, might have been just as happy with a shorter sentence. Fifteen years seemed a long time to wait.

  THE DOUGHTY DOZEN

  The group of strangers who sat down next to each other in an Old Bailey courtroom one day in November 1996 might not have struck an observer as the epitome of ‘twelve good men and true’. They would have looked a pretty unimpressive lot: ill-at-ease, slightly dazed, a good deal more cowed than the four men in the dock. They did not have many A-levels among them. One or two had never passed an exam in their lives. They were there to perform an extremely demanding task. You would not have entrusted it to any single member of this group in a million years.

  On-duty, they did their best to take in hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of words of complicated, contradictory evidence. They suppressed yawns, sucked sweets and watched the courtroom clock. Off-duty, the men talked about football and played cards. The women did quizzes in magazines and discussed the merits of leather sofas. The smokers got up the non-smokers’ noses. The men got up the women’s. Yet they all seemed to rub along rather well together. You could even say, were you to insist, that they bonded.

  Surprisingly quickly, it was no longer a group of a dozen strangers. It was a jury: Judge Goldstein’s, Mr Korkolis’s and Roy the usher’s jury. During the months that followed it began to seem that this ungainly twelve-headed creature operated really rather well. Everyone in some way made a contribution: the young GPO sorter, Sophie, who proved a whiz at Greek names; Eddie the Anglo-Spaniard who understood mobile-phone technology; Anna, our London-born Italian, who knew about Mediterranean family loyalties; Bob the postman who was hot on cars; Rangers-supporting Stuart who had a remarkable knowledge of previous trials. We had a trained psychologist among us, which was a bonus. And when we wanted to take a look at a Rover just like the kidnappers’ which happened to be parked outside the jury room window one day, we had a plane-spotter with a pair of binoculars in a carrier bag.

  The body that eventually decided to find Constantinos Korkolis and his fellow-defendants guilty was not a voting panel of twelve individuals. It was an English jury. Its character was formed by class, culture, nationality, education, experience, prejudice, the judge, the court, the case and a host of other influences – but the most important of these was simply luck.

  Researchers beware. A jury is a random construct with a dynamic of its own, ‘a strange potion’ as a Labour QC once told the House of Commons. No two juries can be the same. Yet for the system to function we have to assume that every jury is the same. Because the jury is not so much a tool, as an idea. It is an admirable idea. But it will continue to work only so long as we continue to have faith in it.

  AFTERMATH

  It was fairly late in the evening when the last juror left McGovern’s. Some of us overshot our stations on the way home. We had exchanged addresses, vowed to keep in touch, talked about a grand reunion. Apparently a lot of juries behave like this after a long trial.

  During the following summer we telephoned each other quite frequently. I had a card from Terrie in Spain. Pat faxed from Auckland, where she was busy looking for a house. Magnus rang to say that by an extraordinary coincidence one of his fellow package tourists on a visit to Moscow had been Commander Niall Mulvihill, head of Scotland Yard’s Organised Crime Group and Laurie Vanner’s boss. He knew all about our case, and described Korkolis as a sociopath. Stuart telephoned with his opinion of the new government, whom he thought a load of right plonkers.

  Sophie and I had lunch together when she had a day off from her sorting office. Like the rest of us, she was still excited about the trial. 'I do miss it,’ she said. ‘It was the most interesting experience of my life. I’d love to do it again.’ She had two improvements to suggest. First, judges should make it clear at the outset not only that juries may take notes but that they should do. Second, counsel should explain the purpose of a particular line of questioning or the calling of a particular witness before they embark on it: then jurors would know what to listen out for.

  Sophie told me that some time after the trial she had gone along to George Fraghistas’s offices in Albemarle Street. She did not know exactly why she went except that she wanted to know that George was all right. She had stood outside the office but had not known what to do next. So she didn’t go in, and after a while she left. When I met George some weeks later and told him this story he was immensely touched.

  I did not visit Albemarle Street. But I did re-visit Hogan Mews. This time I noticed that Westway, the elevated extension of the M40 into central London, was no more than a couple of hundred yards away from the mews. The traffic emitted a low, unceasing roar even at four o’clock in the afternoon: it would have blanketed any but the loudest cries from a frightened man imprisoned in a windowless room.

  Then I drove from the mews to Lanark Road, timing myself. Despite the speed bumps and the beginnings of the rush-hour, the journey took me just over four minutes door to door. To those unfamiliar with the kidnapper’s rule-book, this might seem eerily close. It did to me. It gave me a moment’s post-verdict anxiety. True, Hizbollah hid hostages like Terry Waite and John McCarthy right in the heart of Beirut, a busy modern city being the best kind of haystack in which to conceal a needle. But still, a mere four-minutes’ drive from seizure to incarceration struck me as unprecedentedly cheeky.

  DCI Laurie Vanner, a man with huge experience of this kind of crime, eventually set my mind at rest. Hogan Mews was the ideal place to hide George Fraghistas, he explained. The most dangerous time for kidnappers is when they are transporting their victim to wherever he is to be held. They are vulnerable to traffic accidents or a police search. The captive might shout or kick to attract the atte
ntion of passers-by, or even escape. The shorter the time he is in motion, the better. These people, I gathered, had known what they were doing.

  I was also curious to take a look at the Rose Court Hotel, that hotbed of gambling Greeks where Thanassis Zografos had fallen into bad company. So one day I did.

  The Rose Court Hotel was not quite the raffish place I had imagined. It is one of those dispiriting establishments that cluster around Paddington Station offering succour to the friendless and far-from-home. There are whole Victorian terraces of them, their improbably grand names proclaimed in nasty italic lettering. The Rose Court has chosen a cerise typeface with which to disfigure its white-painted façade. It overlooks a small, oblong square shaded in summer by plane trees. There is an air of seedy gentility about the whole area.

  A tousle-haired man eyed me impassively from the reception desk and nodded when I asked if I could look around. Once upon a time this would have been Zografos’s job. There was nothing much to see. The place felt as though it were striving for anonymity: two small reception rooms, claustrophobically gloomy, a bar, a narrow staircase leading up to the bedrooms. The ambience was 1950s provincial. Listening to Zografos describing the hotel as a home-from-home for expatriate Greeks, I had pictured something cheerier. I had imagined I would have an ouzo in the smoky, taverna-style bar, and chat up one or two of the long-term guests over a dish of mezze. Instead the place was deathly quiet.

  I wondered if the Rose Court clients had followed the trial in their newspapers. The Greek press had been full of the story. And it wasn’t over yet. A fifth man had been charged with taking part in the kidnap of George Fraghistas: Kyriakos Pantelides, the mysterious figure who had been on bail during our trial and whose voice we had heard on Korkolis’s secret tapes. His trial was coming up soon. Kate and I arranged to go together.