Thursday, February 01, 2007

 

It's been such a trial

It’s all over – my jury service that is. I’ve been fired, turned out onto the streets, surplus to requirements. They want a new face, a new point of view, so someone else is using my locker, sitting in my chair, drinking shitty coffee from my cup. Yes, I know, there was a lot of commuting, extortionate parking fees, a lot of hanging about while counsels discussed points of law, but damn it, it was my job and I loved it and I’m going to miss it. And besides, I never got answers to all my questions. The man on trial had nine charges against him ranging from kidnap and rape to intimidation, but he wasn’t some knife-wielding maniac dragging off a stranger, but a pathetic loser and the whole case had an air of tragedy about it. Romeo and Juliet it wasn’t – there were no pretty speeches between love-struck teenagers, just the ugly street lingo of “yeah” and “right” interspersing every other word; no warring families tearing them apart, only a man’s obsession, jealousy and control freakery, which escalated out of control. The victim, a 17 year old, vulnerable girl, whose responses in cross examination tried the patience of everyone in court, took three days to give her evidence, as she chewed her lip, looked at the ceiling with tear filled eyes, contradicted her original statements and when asked why she had or hadn’t done things simply said “I can’t remember” or “I don’t know”. But despite this, or maybe because of this, we all believed her story, which began in the normal way of things: girl meets boy, they go out for a couple of months, she decides she doesn’t like him any more and wants to end the relationship. Sadly for this timid girl, who wasn’t very bright or well educated, she wasn’t allowed to end it and suffered a series of humiliating and terrifying experiences before desperation drove her to tell someone. She told of incidents where the man routinely dumped her out of his car and made her walk home when she refused to have sex; snatched her phone as she stood outside the car and when she put her arm inside the window to retrieve it, trapped it and drove off, making her walk beside the car, telling her “this is what happens when you say no”; and how his friend had helped to kidnap her from her house as she answered the door, bundled her into the car, driven off and raped her. Even then she had not complained to the police, because she blamed herself for what had happened and was too scared to tell her parents. But when the man continued to harass her and on two subsequent occasions sexually assaulted her, she buckled and confessed everything to her father, who called the police. It would need a Miss Marple to solve the mystery of why, when arrested, he told the police that he knew the girl only by sight, had no idea where she lived or worked, she’d never been in his car and he’d never had sex with her. Why did he say that, when it would have been much more difficult to convict him on the rape charge if he’d said the sex had been consensual – giving him no reason to have to scrap his car the day after his arrest? He then made two attempts to intimidate her, threatening harm to her and her young brother if she didn’t drop the charges. He declined the opportunity to take the witness stand or to offer an alibi for the night of the rape and brought no witnesses in his defence. I learned the next day, quite coincidentally, that the figure for rape convictions is less than 6%, so it was remarkable that we did return guilty verdicts, given the unreliability of some of the girl's evidence. Throughout the hearing, we jurors had established a very friendly relationship with lots of shared jokes, biscuits and buns and though there was a huge variation in age, background and character, it was nice to see how everyone listened respectfully to another's point of view, although two of the young lads gave us way too much information on the mechanics of sex in the back of a Peugot 106 (the car used in the rape)! It was all such an interesting experience, even though I was champing at the bit to get back to all the other jobs waiting for me, that I didn’t want it to end. But they couldn’t get rid of me that easily. I left my phone in the locker, so the next day when I went to collect it, I was able to get one last glimpse of the justice system in action.

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