When, in months to come, the jury closes the door having heard all
the evidence in the trial of the failed bombing campaign in London of
21 July, what will be uppermost in their minds?
Will it be the judge’s summing up? The closing statements from defence or prosecution lawyers?
Meticulous
evidence of forensic experts or testimony from key witnesses to the
suspects’ movements? One thing’s for sure. It’s not going to be a
newspaper headline, however incendiary, that they read countless weeks
earlier on the day of their arrests.
Yet civil liberties
campaigners have written to the attorney general urging him to crack
down on newspapers such as The Sun (“Got the Bastards”)n and the Daily
Express (“Brave police catch ALL the cowardly suicide bombers”) for,
they claim, jeopardising the suspects’ right to a fair trial.
Related
Another
certainty: as jurors are barred from discussing deliberations we’ll
never know what they were thinking, or the process by which they
reached their conclusions.
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