You Don't Know Me

40

PROSECUTION COUNSEL:

Members of the jury, in Hertford, Herefordshire and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen. Here at the Central Criminal Court, a second prosecution closing speech hardly ever happens. It is happening now, however, at the direction of the learned Judge.

This is an unusual case.

Not because it involves the deliberate and planned murder of a teenaged boy. Not even because it involves a murder committed with a firearm. Sadly, in London, the shooting of young men by other young men with lethal weapons has become an all too familiar story. No, this case is unusual because the Defendant in this case elected to deliver his own closing speech. He has been speaking to you now for some days. That in itself is unusual.

Unfortunately, however, the Defendant in his speech has referred to facts upon which he now relies, but which he didn’t mention in his evidence. Much of what he has said is completely new. You haven’t heard it before. I haven’t heard it before now. Which means that he hasn’t been cross-examined about the things he is now telling you. That puts you, members of the jury, at a great disadvantage. For how, unless you have heard his evidence being tested in cross-examination, do you assess the quality of it? In other words how do you form a judgement about its reliability? How can you be sure if it is true?

This is why with the agreement and support of the Judge I now address you for a second time. However, to preserve the Defendant’s legal right to the final word, he is also to be permitted to address you, in reply to the prosecution speech.

I’m not going to go over everything that the Defendant has said. That would be to insult your intelligence. You have just heard everything he has to say. It is not for me simply to contradict what he says. You can see for yourselves where the weaknesses lie and it is for you to make of them what you will. No. I just make a few points for you to consider. As before. Accept them if you agree with them. Ignore them if you don’t.

It is important that we are absolutely clear about this from the start. We the Prosecution say that everything the Defendant has told you in his defence is a lie.

He lied in his interview with the police and he repeated those lies from the witness box when he gave evidence. Now though we have a whole new set of lies. Different lies from his evidence. Different lies from his interview. But, we say, lies nonetheless. From a Defendant who is, quite literally, making it up as he goes along.

Let us pause, if we may, to examine this recently invented story a little more thoroughly. Here are the problems you may think that the Defendant faces.

Firstly, there is no evidence at all that the gentleman, whom the Defendant is only able to name by the pseudonym, Face was shot dead, as the Defendant now claims. There is no, and I pause to emphasize this point, there is no evidence that this man even existed because the Defendant can tell us nothing else about this other, allegedly murdered, man. No evidence that drug dealers or indeed anybody was shot in a nightclub of the name identified by the Defendant, in the circumstances he relays. None. Not a shred, not a scrap. It is not simply invention, ladies and gentlemen, it is pure, uncorroborated fiction.

If two men, nay even one man, were to be shot dead in a nightclub, you can be sure, can you not, that there would be some evidence to support it? A police report perhaps? Or is it, as the Defendant would no doubt have you believe, a result of some sinister conspiracy by MI5 that the details have eluded the police? What about the press? Not a single news report or headline or column exists of a story describing the events that the Defendant has told you. Have they too been silenced by MI5?

And what about the mysterious and beguiling Kira? Where is she? Indeed who is she? Does she exist? Are we really being expected to believe that she, the Defendant’s girlfriend, was some kind of assassin recruited by the Secret Services? Never, I venture to suggest, has such unadulterated rubbish been heard in a court of law. It is not simply rubbish. It is an insult. To this court. To you.

And I finish this mercifully short address by making just two final comments. We say they are decisive. If, as the Defendant has suggested, he was prepared to shoot dead two men with a nine millimetre pistol, in cold blood, what does that tell you about the lengths to which he is prepared to go to for his own ends? Does it, ultimately, even if your credulity can be stretched to the extent that the Defendant has attempted to stretch it, help him? Or does the fact that he was prepared to murder two men convict him of the murder with which he stands charged before you?

And we finish with this question. Why has not one word of this story been repeated by the one person who could corroborate this? Curt, who might have been able to help you, has conveniently vanished. What a shame for this Defendant. Kira also has vanished and now has an imagined new identity. But there is one person who has not vanished. She indeed has been in this courtroom all along. The Defendant’s sister, Blessing. Why have you not heard from her? After all, it seems, at long last, she now speaks. But not to you, ladies and gentlemen. Not to you.