Sunday 5 April 2009

Day at the Courts

On Friday I ventured to the courts to do some "reporting". The case i chose to report on was the good old fashioned "body in the suitcase" crime.

The body of Richard Emery, 62 was found last year, in a suitcase near his home in Bournemouth, Dorset. The day i went was the summary of the defence. The defence was started with the postmortem, which argued that there was no DNA evidence or physical evidence linking the defendants to the body. They then went on to say how some of the witness statements were conflicting and that their reliability was questionable as they kept changing their statements. The defence lawyer even went as far to say that one of the witnesses was, and I quote, "bonkers" hahaha.

This was all very interesting and oddly entertaining but my visit to the courts was unfortunately cut short. A member of the Jury began to choke terribly and the judge subsequently had to call for a break (that felt rather surreal). Then when they returned, the Judge decided that court would finish for the day at lunchtime to allow the member of the Jury to go to the doctors in the afternoon. Unfortunately this meant that the prosecution had to sum their case on Monday which was a real kick in the pants as I would be sitting on my lazy back at home on Monday... boo!