The young man smiled as he was freed from the dock. He hugged his relieved parents outside the crown court as we, the jury members at his rape trial, went back to our lives and never met again.
We had exposed that the case against him was riddled with holes. Evidence had been concocted by police, then repeated by prosecution lawyers to try to convict him of a sex crime.
The young man was saved from prison, and a lifetime’s dark smear on his character, because 12 strangers on a jury, randomly thrown together for three days, kept asking questions and insisted on answers.
That’s why I was so ashamed last week to hear that jury trials, the bedrock of the nation’s legal system for centuries, are under threat. Justice Secretary David Lammy told fellow ministers that scrapping juries in all but the most serious cases (such as murder, manslaughter and some sexual offences) would not compromise a suspect’s rights to a fair hearing.
The proposal is an attempt to address unprecedented court delays and backlogs, which see victims in limbo, often for years, and accused people’s lives on tortuous hold as they wait for a trial date.
The backlash against fewer juries was instantaneous across the political divide. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declared that trial by your peers was a fundamental right, which should ‘not be undermined’.
Meanwhile, Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, retorted that Labour has a ‘lawyers-know-best’ attitude: ‘They think ordinary people aren’t up to it.’
The jury system has its faults, of course. An oft-quoted fictional story in legal circles has a judge, summing up to the jury, saying: ‘The facts of this distressing case have already been put before you some four or five times, twice by prosecuting counsel, twice by counsel for the defence, and once at least by each of the various witnesses who have been heard.
Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy wants to restrict the use of juries in criminal court trials
‘But so low is my opinion of your understanding that I think it is necessary, in the simplest language, to tell you the facts again.’
Yet most jurors are not fools. Nor are they racist. David Lammy’s own 2017 review of jury trials said they were the only part of the justice system that was ‘consistently free from racial bias’.
Which brings us back to the young man before our jury, almost a decade ago. He happened to be a black Briton of Caribbean heritage. His accuser came from the same London community.
Our jury members were a mix of ages and ethnicities. One was a City worker, another a council chief, while a couple were retired or jobless. But no juror mentioned the background or skin colour of the accused or the victim.
The story we heard in court was that a girl had been raped by a young man she hardly knew in the bedroom of her home one Friday night. The girl, let’s call her ‘Cherie’, had gone to a nightclub where, by chance, she’d met a long-lost school friend who had always found her attractive.
They danced, he bought her five glasses of vodka and Coke, she became tipsy and nearly slipped to the floor. At the end of the evening, the accused man offered her a taxi ride home to the flat she shared with her brother in suburban London.
There, Cherie – apparently befuddled with drink – and her new-found friend went into her bedroom where they had sex against her wishes. In the early hours of the morning, she emerged to make a coffee in the kitchen, where her brother confronted her about the man in her bedroom.
She told him it was all a mistake: she hadn’t invited him there and her nightclub friend had forced himself upon her without consent.
That, at least, was the tale related in court by the police and a team of Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) barristers as we, the jury, listened intently.
Because of confidentiality laws concerning a jury’s deliberations, I cannot disclose the private discussions we had before deciding the young man was innocent.
But what became clear in court was that the police were, seemingly, under intense pressure to secure a conviction. A fall in successful rape prosecutions was coming under scrutiny.
Today, it’s still low. Of 2,283 people prosecuted for rape in England last year, just 1,220 were eventually found guilty.
In our case, the police appeared to have exaggerated the amount Cherie drank to prove she’d been incapable of consenting to sex and, therefore, that the young man was guilty. After Cherie told her brother she had been raped, he immediately called an ambulance, which took her to hospital.
Specialists were brought in. Her blood-alcohol levels were tested and she was physically examined. Once the investigation had started, it ran like a train.
The first sign to us jurors that something was wrong came when the prosecuting barrister’s opening speech focused on Cherie’s five vodka and colas and their effect. A picture of Cherie at the nightclub was passed to the jury, with the CPS claiming it showed her in a state of near-collapse.
Yet to us, Cherie appeared to be happily dancing. We passed a note to the judge, asking how she had been able to dance if she’d been so drunk. And we requested that the CPS barrister read out the interview Cherie gave police about the alcohol she had consumed.
For good measure, we requested the judge allow the original recording of her words to be played in open court. Thank goodness he acquiesced, with a raised eyebrow saying: ‘All this is most unusual in England.’ (The rules deem that a jury should only ask a judge for guidance on relevant law rather than question court evidence.)
Both the transcript and the tape revealed Cherie had told police she had consumed only two drinks, not five. Far from being unable to consent to sex, she had been virtually sober.
The paramedics who collected Cherie in the ambulance also confirmed their blood tests showed a level of alcohol so low that she could easily have danced the night away without falling over.
This was serious. Here was a girl trapped in the headlights. Under pressure, perhaps because of family disapproval, she had been caught up in a relentless process that can propel a woman to wrongly allege rape – and then find it hard to recant.
As one lawyer who watched in court said afterwards: ‘Without the jury’s probing questions to the judge, and a judge who accepted they should be answered, the truth might never have emerged.’
Would a single judge overseeing this trial, perhaps one of dozens in a year, have picked up the over-egged police evidence? We can’t be sure. When our jury unanimously delivered our not-guilty verdict, two of the police officers handling the case sat with their heads in their hands.
Yet justice had been done. Like many jurors before us, and since, we had spotted the case was flawed. I hope that ‘ordinary people’ will not be stopped from doing the same in the future.