Ouija Board Jurors

Jeremy Gans

Description

The Ouija board jury incident of 1994 is one of the most disconcerting in English legal history. In this first full-length treatment he emphasises the known facts, the constitutional dilemma of investigating even bizarre jury misbehaviour and how the trial involved one of the most serious murder cases of the decade in which two people were shot in cold blood.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Inglaterra
• Legal history
• Criminal procedure
• England

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910979396
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Ouija Board Jurors
Mystery, Mischief and Misery in the Jury System
Jeremy Gans
Copyright and publications details
The Ouija Board Jurors: Mystery, Mischief and Misery in the Jury System
Jeremy Gans
ISBN 978-1-909976-48-1 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-39-6 (Epub E-book)
ISBN 978-1-910979-40-2 (Adobe E-book)
Copyright © 2017 This work is the copyright of Jeremy Gans. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2017 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com
Printed by Lightning Source.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
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Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
e-book The Ouija Board Jurors: Mystery, Mischief and Misery in the Jury System is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Published 2017 by
Waterside Press Ltd
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Table of Contents
Copyright and publications details ii
About the author vi
Foreword vii A Juror’s Letter 9
A spate of cases 10
The Old Ship 15
Holiday camp atmosphere 19
Arranging a reunion 23
Impossible conflict 27
The shadow of injustice 31 Flash Harry 35
Larger-than-life 36
Blackmans Cottage 39
Prime suspect 43
Pillar of the community 46
English rose 50
Rolls of cash 55
Inner circle 57 Only a Game 59
The talking board 61
The most bizarre appeal 67
Beyond the evidence 71
An awkward decision 74
The heart of the case 78
The greatest Lord Chief Justice 82 Iceman 85
Imagine the shock 86
Smile of a killer 89
The bullets I had sold 91
Operation Arrowhead 94
Ali the Baddie 99
As if nothing had happened 102
Gun cupboard 104 Mansfield’s Window 107
A delicate minuet 109
Outside of the door 115
The freedom to act irresponsibly 119
An embarrassing situation 124
Horror stories 127
The absurdities of life 131 The Horrid Part 133
The previous jury 135
A little levity 138
Your worst nightmare 141
Empty shells 144
Channelling the victim 149
Each one alone 154
The choice 157 Such a Fearful Spectre 161
First blush 162
Various newspaper headlines 167
Strange circumstances 172
Earth-bound evidence 176
A lighter tale 181
Such a stupid thing 185
Jekyll and Hyde 189
The pain is still here 193
Afterword 199
Formal sources 199
Informal sources 207
Index 209
About the author
Jeremy Gans is a Professor at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, generally regarded as Australia’s top law school. He researches on all areas of criminal justice and has had treatises published on evidence (Oxford University Press), criminal law (Cambridge University Press) and criminal process rights (Federation Press, Australia), as well as numerous academic articles, including several focussing on particular criminal cases, such as the murder of Peter Falconio and the death of Azaria Chamberlain. He is also a frequent commentator in the Australian media on criminal justice and has blogged for a range of websites.
Foreword
While backpacking in Europe in 1994, I came across several newspaper tales about derailed criminal proceedings: a visiting tourist from New York who was identified by an eyewitness as a Nazi as he sat in the public gallery of a war crimes trial, a bank robbery conviction that was overturned because the accused was named ‘Rob Banks’, and an English murder trial under appeal because jurors had used a Ouija board to consult one of the victims. I laughed at all three stories and filed them away as neat hypotheticals for my planned career as a criminal and evidence law teacher.
After I started teaching, I was startled to discover that at least two of these tales were true. Indeed, the least believable of the three was the subject of an official law report. The English Court of Appeal ruling allowing Stephen Young’s appeal against his convictions even included a transcript of the séance with murder victim Harry Fuller, courtesy of an affidavit by one of the four jurors who met in a hotel room and created a mock Ouija board with a glass and some paper. A footnote to the report pointed out that Young was convicted again at his Old Bailey retrial.
The Ouija board case has had a lengthy afterlife as an anecdote in legal judgements, articles and speeches, both in England and in my own Australia. As I write this Foreword, it featured once again in the 35 th Blackstone Lecture by Court of Appeal judge Heather Hallett, 23 years after the Ouija board incident. After detailing the contemporary scourge of jurors’ Googling, she adds:
Then of course there is the jury that goes off on an inexplicable frolic of its own. In the trial of R v Young the charge was murder and it was in the days when juries were on occasion sent off to a hotel, for fear they may succumb to outside pressure at a crucial time in their deliberations.
While, as here, the tale is often told with a mix of humour and disbelief, sometimes anger enters the mix. The genesis of this book came in early 2014, close to the incident’s 20 th anniversary, when Australia’s High Court, ruling on the limits to jury secrecy, described the Ouija board case as about ‘irresponsible behaviour in relation to the consideration of the guilt of the accused’. Although I had long used the case as an anecdote of my own, that description just didn’t sit right with my own (second-hand) experience of how heavy jurors’ responsibilities were and how seriously they took them.
I had by then come to realise that official law reports are a poor window into reality. While the facts in those reports are (nearly always) true enough, they are also (nearly always) incomplete — often very incomplete. Even a little research on the Ouija board case showed that there was much more in the public domain about it than is set out in the 1994 law report, much less the anecdotes that describe or (nearly always) misdescribe it. It helps that the trial the jurors sat on involved a fairly high profile prosecution and one where the defendant continues to maintain his innocence.
As I looked further, I began to wonder: was the Ouija board incident, arguably the nadir of reported juror misbehaviour in the 20 th -century, really as bad, or even as funny, as everyone (including me) had long assumed? Rather, I came to see that, far from it being, as Heather Hallett recently declared, ‘inexplicable’, it is at least partially understandable, once the full facts of the case before the jury, and especially the particularly distressing evidence they had to consider, are known.
My study of the case, outlined in this book, is based almost entirely on publicly available documents. The afterword outlines the particular sources I used, as well as several that I couldn’t or didn’t.
Chapter 1
A Juror’s Letter
A spate of cases — The Old Ship — Holiday camp atmosphere — Arranging a reunion — Impossible conflict — The shadow of injustice.
On Tuesday 19 th April 1994, the Crown Court in Lewes, the administrative centre of East Sussex, received a letter that sparked six months of anguished hearings before England’s Court of Appeal, a retrial and much derision of the jury system. The unsigned, handwritten, three-page letter was dated the previous day and concerned events four weeks earlier. Attached to it was a request from a man found guilty of murder by (amongst other members of his jury) the letter’s author to have his conviction and twin life sentences set aside, possibly forever.
Although it was never published, the letter’s content is clear from a lengthy article that appeared in the News of the World that Sunday. The two-page spread commenced:
The murder trial jurors who used a ouija board before reaching their verdict held the séance after a bawdy booze-up, says the colleague who blew the whistle on them.
The tabloid’s headline — ‘ BOOZE, DIRTY JOKES AND THEN THE OUIJA BOARD’ — somehow gave an entirely sex-free case a sexy angle — apparently, in-between drinks at the bar and talk of séances at dinner, the jurors told some off-colour jokes. That was the least of their alleged sins.
The rest of the article was much more downbeat, laying out the sombre words of the juror who penned the letter:
I just couldn’t live with myself. To me, this was a miscarriage of justice. I thought to myself ‘This is someone’s life we’re dealing with’. I was astonished that these grown-up people had played this child’s game.
Juror Adrian’s account of events at Brighton’s The Old Ship Hotel — the first of many versions of the tale of the Ouija board jurors — is necessarily incomplete. He had only second-hand knowledge of the key events that night. Doubtless, his account reflects both his own slant and the editing of News Corporations’s journalists and lawyers. Nevertheless, it was the first version of the story to reach the public and the courts, laying-out a tale that is troubling both in its startling centrepiece in a Brighton hotel room and the more mundane minutiae of life on a jury.
A spate of cases
I couldn’t have lived with myself that someone had been put away because of a ouija board. It has now eased my mind making a statement. I know I have made the right decisio