Doing My Duty: On Being a Juror in a Murder Trial at the Old Bailey

I.

In surely the strangest coincidence of my life, I once began jury duty on a murder trial at the Old Bailey (London’s Central Criminal Court) on the very same day that I went on to review a new West End production of the famous 1954 jury play, Twelve Angry Men, by Reginald Rose. I was the chief theatre critic of the Financial Times; I’d known for three months that I’d be reviewing that production. Then, a month before that press night, I received the summons to the Old Bailey for jury duty starting that same day. This was already one uncanny coincidence, but inevitably I did not know until the afternoon of that first day that I would be a juror for a murder.

The case was complex. It lasted over three weeks, with four men accused of murder and violent assault resulting in the death of a single man. I divulge none of the main secrets of the jury room. Neither now nor at any time have I identified which murder case it was nor who my fellow jurors were.

The connections between “my” murder trial and Twelve Angry Men did not stop with my going from one to the other on that first day. In important details, the murder described in the play corresponded to the murder that had been described that afternoon at the Old Bailey. Which witnesses could have seen the murder? And from where? At what angle did the blade enter the victim’s torso?

To address these questions twice in the same day, even though the Old Bailey case would not reach a climax for over three weeks, was a keen shock. As I watched Twelve Angry Men, my eyes kept filling with tears. What strange stroke of destiny had brought these things into my life twice over? Was fate telling me something?

 In the event, my Twelve Angry Men coincidence turned out to be just that: a coincidence. Murders have not gone on to play any subsequent part in my life.

Yet the murder/murder coincidence of trial and play proved useful at the time. I told my fellow jurors (six women, five other men) about Twelve Angry Men at once and about my job as critic; several of them knew the 1957 Twelve Angry film, starring Henry Fonda as the isolated but insistent juror who gradually persuades the other eleven to a verdict opposite to their original one. So when we, in the trial’s fourth week, reached two 11/1 verdicts (and when the judge had told us he would accept 10/2 or 11/1 votes from us), I, now foreman, invoked Twelve Angry Men each time to the odd person out - a different person with each of those two verdicts. As I remember it, I said, “Are you okay with this? Or would you like to play Henry Fonda and be the one who now argues with the other eleven to change our minds?” I hope I said it gently. Every conscientious critic knows the feeling of reaching a verdict that clashes with other reviews.

II.

Many people dread jury work, which can be time-consuming. The Financial Times, however, made a policy of encouraging its writers to do any jury duty that came their way.

I was keen to do so anyway. I was in my early forties; I had stamina. So, on that first night, I rushed from the theatre to file my Twelve Angry Men review that night. It was published in the next day’s FT. Then, for the trial’s first two weeks, I kept up a routine of also reviewing several plays each week. I’d go to the Old Bailey in the mornings to the theatre in the early evenings, then in the late evenings from the theatre to the Financial Times building, filing my review by the deadline of those days, 11.15pm.

After two weeks, however, I felt unable to sustain the pressure of combining jury work with reviewing. (I was making matters harder on myself by keeping a detailed jury diary.) My two FT lieutenant theatre critics, Sarah Hemming and Ian Shuttleworth, admirable colleagues both, leapt skilfully into the breach. I had not anticipated, admittedly, the very different frame of mind with which I would follow the remainder of the trial. I had supposed I would become more relaxed. Not so. Now the trial became all-encompassing, my prime preoccupation. (I did carry on seeing plays several evenings a week, but not reviewing them.)

I was not alone in this. The two jurors seated on my immediate left and right, confronted by something so unlike their usual lives, had already decided, earlier in the trial, that they had to change their lives. For one of them, hers was a positive domestic decision. For another, the change was professional. Although her current job in restoring pictures sounded interesting to me, she now felt she needed to contribute in a larger way to law and order. Already bilingual, she became a translator for legal work.

In the gallery, the audience varied from day to day. Always, however, it included a woman we had identified as the dead man’s mother, usually seated in the same corner seat of the front row. We would sometimes even hear her quietly crying in court.

Several of us jurors lost sleep over the trial and our responsibility to it. In a few cases, aspects of the trial even entered into our dreams.

III.

In a court of law, the jury is given twelve of the best seats in the house; in a theatre, on press nights, critics are given (more or less) the best seats. Whereas other people may let their thoughts come and go during trials and plays, jurors and critics have the same responsibility. Pay close attention! Your duty of reaching your verdict is not one to be undertaken casually or frivolously. (Good jokes, some of them probably close to fact, are told of jurors who have fallen asleep on the job.)

(The late Jack Tinker, urbane and entertaining theatre critic of the Daily Mail, told me of his own experience of jury duty. His jury reached a decision quite quickly one morning, but so enjoyed one another’s company that they decided not to announce their verdict till the afternoon, so that they could all go out to enjoy a good lunch together first.)

There were many differences between the murder described in Twelve Angry Men and the one so often described to us at the Old Bailey. One man had been killed in each, but, in “our” case, four men were accused of both murder and violent assault. On that first day, we twelve jurors were told that our trial was likely to last about three weeks and a half: a prediction that proved remarkably accurate. (We announced our final verdicts just before lunchtime on the third day of the fourth week.)

We soon came to respect and to like our judge. At one point in the third week, however, he told us to find defendants 3 and 4 not guilty of murder. We were nonetheless to continue to consider the case against them for violent assault.

This puzzled some of us jurors; I don’t think any of us ever understood the judge’s rationale. As the evidence had been presented to us, the evidence for the involvement of defendants 3 and 4 was absolutely the same whether the charge was murder or violent assault. They were on the scene of the crime when it turned violent and murderous; there was a two-way history of dangerous animosity between them and the victim; both violent assault and murder had certainly occurred. Nevertheless, no other conclusive evidence about them had been presented to us. Although it was quite possible that both of them had been active in the fatal skirmish, we later (on Day Sixteen of the trial) concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict them of violent assault (or of murder).

Why, then, had the judge, a week earlier, ordered us to pronounce them not guilty of murder alone? On this, as on many other points, we were aware that there was much that the lawyers understood but did not share with us: to this we became resigned. We were promised, for example, several witnesses who did not materialise. No explanations were given. With what we were given, we nonetheless did the best we could. I later heard that we were nicknamed “the intelligent jury” by lawyers around that court; I very much hope - of course! - that rumour was true.

We found one of the four defendants guilty: this was probably the greatest divergence between the Twelve Angry Men murder and ours. I had been chosen as foreman on the first day of the fourth week. The next day, I stood to pronounce Defendants 3 and 4 not guilty. The following day, however, I stood to pronounce Defendant No 1 not guilty of murder and, finally, Defendant no 2 guilty. That last verdict was - as we were asked to tell the court -11:1.

When I delivered the “Not Guilty” verdict for Defendant No 1, it brought a hearty cascade of boos (and one cheer) from the packed gallery. Those boos hit us like an unexpected tsunami. I can still feel how I, almost the only person standing in court, felt that I was trembling. (Other jurors later told me they were trembling too.) I steadied myself by pressing my fingertips onto the desk in front of me. The jury clerk, holding my eyes, murmured quietly “Keep going” or words to that effect.

Then, when I pronounced the “Guilty” verdict, that ovation was reversed. Many cheers; one boo. I remember, however, the same sensation of trembling.

 That night, I called my New York friend the critic Joan Acocella. “You found a man guilty of murder?” she said softly: “Gee - what an existential moment!”

Indeed. It took me weeks until I felt calm again. At one level, I still feel the task changed me forever.

True, critics are better qualified to give public verdicts than most members of the human race. I, after all, had written hundreds of “verdicts” in the Financial Times during the course of my career, and several during the course of my trial. I knew well that some of my reviews had caused extremes of both grief and approbation. The previous year, I had written the review that led Stephen Fry to leave the cast of Cell Mates, a West End premiere by Simon Gray. For a few days, it was unknown where Fry was, even whether he was still alive. Audiences soon stopped booking for Cell Mates after his defection, despite a distinguished replacement. The production, which had been thought review-proof, closed. I take no pride that my review brought about that result - in general, the conditions of London theatre reviewing gave me the feeling that no single review could have drastic effect, a feeling that made me feel wonderfully free - but I also knew that my paragraphs on Fry’s performance were where my review was at its most judicious. I’m not flippant about my acts of judgment. Several of them feel like millstones around my neck, no matter how much I feel I wrote the right thing or how well I justified my opinion. For me, these four law-court verdicts, however, were a new level of public responsibility.

For some of my colleagues, the effect - not just of the boos but of the many realities involved - was yet more overwhelming. When we left that court in the Old Bailey, three of the jurors burst bitterly into tears as soon as we were out of sight of our “audience”. Why those tears? It immediately emerged that two details had eluded me as I, looking only at the clerk, delivered those verdicts. Defendant No 1, when we found him “Not Guilty”, apparently mouthed the words “Thank you” to us. But Defendant No 2, when my voice sounded out in the court with the single word “Guilty”, had immediately flashed a look of violent rage at us: a look that precisely matched one that a witness had described on his face at the moment of the murder. Seeing that look, my co-jurors felt all the more keenly the rightness of our collective decision - they recognised the lethal anger that until now had been just a matter of a witness’s description. That, however, was all part of the shock. Feeling yourself to be right, as every critic knows, doesn’t dry up your emotion or make you insensitive to the human consequences.  

IV.

In the first two weeks of our trial, every day was paced like a thriller. Its twists and surprises kept us now aghast, now entertained. Only on one point did we feel sure: Defendant No 1 had to be guilty. His fingerprints were on the blade that caused the death.

Yet the first day of the third week, Trial Day Eleven, was the most astounding of all. Now the defence opened its case. And for the whole of that day, that first defendant, the man whose fingerprints had been on the murder weapon, was examined and cross-examined by five successive barristers. None of them gave him an easy ride.

For most of us jurors, the day caused a complete reversal. Now, for the first time, we saw grounds for reasonable doubt. The effect of that day in court was startling, overwhelming. I remember having to go straight to bed when I reached home, early in the evening, and quickly falling asleep in complete exhaustion.

“Reasonable doubt” is a crucial concept in law.  This defendant had explained to the court why his fingerprints were on the blade; he also explained why he was not near the violence that caused the murder. Maybe he was telling the truth; maybe he was lying. But he stuck consistently to his story, despite fierce accusations and interrogation from the lawyers. He gave us good cause to doubt any allegation of guilt against him.

Surely all twelve of us have gone on thinking about him for months and years? Yes, from time to time, I still do - though I can no longer clearly remember how he looked or sounded then. He - how I remember my colleagues remarking at the end of the trial - would surely have to leave the country to avoid recriminations. We felt we had come to know him to some degree, even to understand him, from that long day he spent in the witness box: although he had taken a verbal pummelling from the barristers all day long, he had remained impressively consistent. In due course, we found him not guilty. Few of us, however, were convinced he was innocent. Simply, we knew we couldn’t know.

On that final day, Trial Day Seventeen, after we left court, six of us felt we needed to have lunch together, to start winding down from so high-pressure and sustained a process. One of these six - pleasant and sensible, as were most of our co-jurors, perhaps all - was the exception who had voted “Guilty” for Defendant no 1 against us other eleven. Now, after we had ordered our food, she quietly told us that she now felt she could tell us that he had a prior record of committing grievous bodily harm. This was something he had not needed to declare - and had not declared - during the trial.

Here was another shock. Her news did not make us immediately feel that he must be guilty - but we knew from our long deliberations that half the jurors would have wanted to find him so.

 “The information came to me during the trial,” she said. “I didn’t feel it was correct to introduce it into our discussion, so I kept it to myself.”

I admired her tact and good sense. I wonder now, as I did then: How did that information come to her? And was it accurate? If she had mentioned it to the lawyers during the trial, probably a re-trial would have been ordered. We’ll never know. But I thank her (I thanked her then) for having not made it a factor in our discussions.

V.

And the man we did find guilty? Some eighteen month later, as several of us discovered in newspapers, he brought an appeal against our verdict. In the appeal court, he was now found “Not guilty”.

This had two opposite effects on me and on the other jurors with whom I kept in touch. On the one hand, we felt and feel great relief. This man is not incarcerated because of us. His record is cleared. And yet I don’t think any of us jurors felt we’d reached the wrong verdict. (The one person among us who found him not guilty simply could not bear to find anyone guilty in such circumstances.) The other eleven of us, reluctantly, felt that witness testimony tied him too closely to the murder for any “Not guilty” verdict to be fair.

If I had sufficient leisure, I’d investigate the court records for his appeal. I can imagine how the evidence against him might be rearranged to make a good case for “Not guilty”. Those witnesses who were promised us but who then, conveniently, were withheld: did they appear at the appeal? We had experience - see below - of a wonderful witness whom we reluctantly came to believe had been lying in court. Why should her lies be the last? As the evidence was presented to us, though, eleven of us felt we had no alternative. In particular, one good witness had described, not without alarm, how he, Defendant No 2, stood behind the victim and held him, with his arm pinioning the victim’s neck, while the victim was stabbed. And we certainly did not rush to that conclusion. 

VI.

Throughout the trial, each of the lead barristers for the defendants proved superb, each with his or her own personality and method and voice. Some of them were the most famous people in court. In the years that followed, I heard or read their names in various important legal contexts. Ours was not a high-profile murder; our four defendants were not remotely famous. I remain surprised that barristers of such distinction worked on it, and grateful to have had the opportunity to observe them at close quarters. We jurors were all fascinated by them - and by their assistant barristers. One juror, who had been sharing with me a progress report about the men in her life (her ex-husband, and her current partner whom she hoped would become father to her children), made me laugh when she admitted she had been puzzled by the arrival of an unknown stranger into her dreams one weekend: who was this mystery man? Returning to court on the Monday (Trial Day Fifteen), she recognised him as one of the assistant barristers - a man we all felt we knew without having ever met.

The trial produced many poignant points of human detail. There were, strange to say, two strikingly unalike spellings of the victim’s first name and his surname: it was never established which were correct. Some twists in the case were so surprisingly entertaining that I laughed out loud in court. One of the policemen giving evidence spoke like a furtive criminal, even though we had no grounds for doubting his testimony. One witness was, we all agreed, the most charming, beautiful, persuasive of all. Yet the central point of her evidence was - we later decided - a demonstrable lie that had very nearly tipped the whole case a different way. Here was another shock. We had loved her person, her voice, her vividly evocative testimony. But she referred to one item of evidence that we asked to inspect during our deliberations (the murder weapon); and when we held it, we were convinced she had been lying about it.

VII.

Reaching our verdicts was no easy task. I was appointed foreman only when we began the process of deliberation, after the judge’s final address to us. I began by asking everyone to give their verdicts immediately. I wanted to know if there was any point on which we all agreed. Alas, not one. We were split on everything. One juror announced that afternoon, with some fury, “It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m never going to change my mind on this!” It felt then as if others felt the same way.

That evening, when we went home, I felt the weight of my task dragging me down. I spent hours with a close friend, just trying to distract my thoughts from the prospect of what lay ahead.

The next morning, I began by half-quoting Oliver Cromwell to all my colleagues: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” (I omitted Christ’s bowels, admittedly.)

Bless them: they all did. Indeed, they arrived that morning as if already aware they had sounded off too forcibly and inflexibly the day before. By the end of that morning, we reached our “Not guilty” verdicts about Defendants 3 and 4; the court was assembled; I delivered our verdict, which caused no furor. By the end of that afternoon, we had reached a “Guilty” verdict about Defendant 2, though – I blush to say this - I forgot to tell that to the court when we were released for the evening. (We were still at loggerheads over Defendant 1, which made me forget we had reached an 11/1 verdict on no 2.)

On the final morning, I checked with my colleagues that we had indeed decided about Defendant no 2 the previous day. They confirmed we had; they forgave me my oversight in not announcing this to the court the previous afternoon. Gradually that morning, as we continued to discuss our opinions on Defendant No 1, they settled into an 11/1 “Not Guilty” verdict. As I’ve already written here, each of those verdicts caused a furor we had not predicted.

The next day, the first morning after the trial, I found inevitably that its details were still pouring feverishly through my head. I found myself comparing every juror’s initial verdicts to her or his final verdicts. Eleven of us, I now realized, had indeed changed verdicts on at least one defendant. Who was the one person who had stayed fixed in his judgements throughout? I’m embarrassed to admit that - yes, reader - it was myself.

VIII.

That matters now less than it did then. I now see that the two most important revelations of the trial were matters not of verdict but of process and preparation. These are my main reason for this memoir.

In a modern jury trial, when jurors arrive on the first morning that they’re summoned to court, they’re trained. We were shown a video, which took us intelligently and usefully through many aspects of what might be involved.

Problems arise here, though. Nine years later, when I served on another jury at a different London court, the video was merely played in the jury canteen without any attention being drawn to it - and one of the canteen’s two screens on which it was played was non-functional. Half that court’s jurors therefore received no training whatsoever.

The Old Bailey, as you would hope, was far more impressive. Its preparatory video - shown in a special chamber that was itself dramatic - lasted much of an hour, covering most (not all) of the crucial issues that jurors should consider.

On our first day at the Old Bailey, however, a few jurors arrived late, missing much or even all of the video. They included a man who, when our jury was chosen that afternoon, became one of our twelve.

Though the jurors on our case all took it seriously, a few of them were astonishingly unprepared for the responsibility ahead of us. That latecomer, for example, halfway through the trial, told me not to be so concerned about it. “The judge will tell us how to vote, Alastair!” he assured me.

What? You’ll be relieved to hear that our judge, on the contrary, did not tell us what verdict we should give. He, the judge, did take us carefully and helpfully through the issues involved, in a speech lasting more than an hour. But I’ve often wondered how many jurors have arrived at the final deliberation without realizing they should have paid closer attention to the trial’s details earlier on.

Among the most crucial points in jurors’ training is the information that they may ask questions of the court. The procedure is - at any rate it was - to write those questions down on paper, to catch the eye of the court usher, and to hand the note to her (or him). Next, at the first suitable moment, the usher passes that paper to the judge. The judge then reads the question, considers it, and in most cases reads it aloud (or paraphrases it) to the court.

The question may be as simple as a request for a loo-break. But it may also be to check points of law or to inspect items of evidence. Most of our jury requests – we wrote several each day, as I recall – were simply about clarification. The judge usually welcomed such queries. On most points, we were treated as intelligent people.

I remember, above all, that we asked to see the knife with which the victim was killed. We were allowed to do so because it had been introduced as evidence during the trial. (As I’ve written, this made us decide that our favourite witness had been lying.)

We also asked, however, to see a security video that had been referred to during the trial. We had been told in court that this video showed one of the defendants later on the night of the murder, at a time that was of considerable interest in the case. But this we were not allowed to see. Why? It had not been introduced as an evidence exhibit during the trial. When we made our request to see it, the witnesses and evidence had all been been presented in court, but matters were too far advanced for that video to be introduced at this stage.

Nobody at the Old Bailey, even on the jury-training video, had prepared us for that. Indubitably, we would have asked sooner to see that evidence, had anybody informed us of the legal deadline for doing so.

So why did the training video overlook this? I’m afraid the law doesn’t invariably want to treat jurors as intelligent people. To lawyers, it’s more convenient to infantilise juries now and then. A grievous error.

IX.

There’s something else - more remarkable - for which the training video does not prepare jurors. It’s possible – unlikely but possible – for the jury to affect, even to change, the course of the trial. Here’s how.

On Day Two of our trial, the jurors, defendants, and lawyers were all taken to the scene of the murder, within London. This was a large interior space, with two main areas separated by pillars. We were shown the spot where the victim had been killed; we were shown the viewpoints from which various witnesses may have seen the crucial events of that night.

When we resumed the trial at the Old Bailey, the barristers proceeded through a series of those witnesses. With reference to a map of the scene of the crime, the witnesses were examined and cross-examined. Here was classic Twelve Angry Men stuff: Where were you and what could you have seen from there?

We jurors had copies of that same map. But we, unlike the witnesses, also had photographs of the place. After two witnesses had been examined, I realised that the map was wrong: its pillars weren’t where the photographs’ pillars were. Our witnesses were being asked to show where they had been with reference to the map, where the assault and murder had occurred on that map, and what they therefore could have seen according to that map - when the map itself was misleading.

I checked with the juror on my left if she agreed with me. She did. I duly wrote a note, caught our usher’s eye, and passed it to her. The judge soon read it, checked map and photographs, and stopped proceedings in court. Yes, the map was wrong, he observed out loud, calmly but ruefully: it should not be used in court again. The Crown Prosecution Service was told to have a new map drawn up.

What do we learn from this? That jurors sometimes play closer attention to the evidence than lawyers.

Shouldn’t this possibility form part of jury training? You, the jurors, aren’t merely passive observers. Don’t let the law infantilise you. There’s just a chance that you, by doing your duty carefully, can make an active difference to the trial.

I found that out by accident. Shouldn’t all juries be prepared for this eventuality on purpose, before they begin their task? Pay close attention. Ask those questions. Who knows? You, too, may change the lives of others.

 @Alastair Macaulay 2022

1:The Old Bailey or Central Criminal Court, London

2: The Old Bailey, or Central Criminal Court, London.

3: One court at the Central Criminal Court or Old Bailey, London.