When I lived in London, one of my favorite pastimes was watching the trials at Old Bailey. Especially for fans of our current "Law & Order"-type television programs, English trials provide an interesting contrast to American procedures.
The Old Bailey - a prominent building not far from St. Paul’s Church - was once the Newgate Prison that figures so prominently in Charles Dickens’ work. The trials held there are open to the public, and the guards will indicate where the most interesting cases are in session. These are likely to be murder or rape cases.
On one of my visits, another old guy who was a regular came up to me and asked how such and such a trial had come out. He’d seen me every time I’d been there and assumed I was a regular. Obviously a group of trial aficionados keeps track of the outcomes of the longer trials for one another.
The judge and the barristers, known here as trial lawyers, in their wigs and robes, are polite to one another. On one of my first visits I watched a murder trial. The defense barrister was doing the questioning, but if I hadn’t known, I would have said he was the prosecutor.
The young man had evidently killed his father in an argument, then had phoned the authorities as if he were a neighbor and had come back after the police arrived. Later he said he had found his father dead and had panicked. The more he talked, the more he sounded guilty.
The question I had was why his lawyer didn’t help him get his story straight before he put him on the stand. At that point, I was just beginning to understand that an English barrister doesn’t see his job as getting his client off at any cost but instead as just ensuring that he gets proper representation.
Later, when I was introduced to a barrister, I told her I found it hard in following the line of questioning of the witnesses to tell the prosecution from the defense.
She said, "Why should you?" I explained that in America the defense usually worked out the story with the defendant, did a lot of objecting to the prosecution’s evidence and questions, and, all in all, did everything possible to get the defendant off.
In a tone indicating that I was not too bright, she explained that a trial was a way of discovering the truth and that was the main reason for having a trial. She said any collusion between the barrister and the accused would get in the way of that goal. As an American, I found that a rather novel approach.
In America, witnesses have often been carefully rehearsed. At least they have gone over their testimony with someone so that they don’t keep contradicting themselves or continue to say they don’t remember.
One day when I had a female visitor with me, the guard at the door suggested that the trial in progress was not a good one to watch because it involved homosexuality, what they call buggery.
The Brits are evidently very sensitive about this subject because the jury was not only all-male but also all older males, as opposed to the murder trial we watched next, which had a jury that seemed quite young and included seven women.
In the first trial a young man had brought a rape charge against two other males, but as the lawyers politely worked him over it looked like a made-up story to protect himself against his mother’s anger at his homosexual activities. Part of the problem was that he changed what happened too often. They had tied him to a chair; no they had tied him to a table turned upside down on a bed. The female barrister seemed very friendly to him and led him around without his seeming to have any awareness of how inconsistent he was being.
The murder trial involved a barroom brawl in which one man had been stabbed to death before a rather large number of witnesses, four of whom testified during the time we watched.
I had watched trials of barroom murder before and noticed an interesting phenomenon.
In being certified, the witness would be asked how many years he had been coming to that pub and how much he had drunk that evening. Usually the witness was a regular who had been frequenting that pub for many years.
The remarkable thing to me was the number of drinks - usually five to seven pints - that had been drunk before the incident. The barrister would then say, "You were quite sober then?" and the witness would reply, "Yes, I was."
Personally, five to seven pints of their beer would have put me in another realm of reality.
One morning, it took me awhile to find something to watch because many of the trials were just getting started. I found a plea situation with no jury. The young man had killed his mother because she had spoiled his dinner. She had not wanted to take him home from the mental hospital and was trying to find some other place for him to live. He made mouth movements and jerked his leg as he listened to the psychiatrist’s testimony and smiled when the judge sentenced him to a mental hospital for treatment. He was the first accused I’d seen who was dressed up with a tie and a new haircut.
Friends and relatives visiting me from the United States often found observing trials at the Old Bailey one of the high points of their trips.
