"Are we?" "Friends?" "Well, I..." "I hope so." "Mum?" "God!" "If I don't want to go through with it?" "Make a decision quickly." "I'm assuming there's been no progress over your getting to America?" "I have an appointment for a visa application at the embassy." "He up there on his computer, morning and night." "As you know, obsessive interest in something is typical of Asperger's." "What do you want?" "I've got nothing!" "What do you want?" "You're the juror here, not me." "Yours is the only opinion that matters." "So not in the house where Holly Jackson was murdered?" "No." "Nor were you ever on Huntley Common, where Rebecca Cheung's body was found?" "No, never." "Never." "Good night." "Tasha..." "Short for Natasha?" "Russian." "Love it." "Please tell me there were Russians in your family." "All right." "There were Russians in my family." "Glamorous white Russians?" "Like..." "Like Natasha Rostova?" "Who?" "The heroine of War And Peace." "I knew that." "Actually, my father's family comes from Lewisham." "And my mother's side is from..." "North Wales." "Right." "I see I've disappointed you." "Do I look disappointed?" "We're going to give her a wash now." "Of course, of course." "What's the time, please?" "'It's nearly ten past six.'" "the Jury Abolition Bill goes to the vote in the Commons today, with a growing band of critics claiming that it is one public spending cut too many." "The latest high-profile defender of the right to trial by jury" "What is it that has drawn you into the middle of this fierce debate..." "Goodness, Sunday best?" "Yes." "Well, I..." "I offered to take Tahir to the American Embassy today." "It'll be a bit of a dash, mind you, during our lunchtime, so I've booked Jackson to take us there and back." "How very extravagant of you." "No, no, no." "Not at all." "Money well spent." "The least I can do... to help a charming young man." "And, as you can tell, I've grown rather fond of him." "Now..." "Club tie?" "Bow tie?" "What?" "What have I done now?" "Well, some women do regret having an abortion, if not straight away, after they've had it, many years down the line." "Often when they've had their first child." "They start to have feelings of anxiety, depression ... so unexpected, I didn't know what to do, I really liked my life as it was." "I spent so many sleepless nights just thinking about what would happen ... sleep disturbance, social problems, relationship issues." "All these are certainly examples of the emotional-health problems of many women encountering..." "I never once imagined all the things I would gain." "The happiness, the fulfillment." "Yes, I do." "A number of emotional-health issues exhibited by many women, who have had abortions ... a sense of fulfillment, of happiness." "It was just the best thing ever ... disturbed at night as well ..." "..by no means an easy decision, but it was the right decision to terminate my pregnancy." "It was my choice." "I have absolutely no regrets about my abortion." "Why won't you let us call the police?" "They might find the boys that did this to you." "But if a crime has been committed, it is your duty to report it." "At least let me call the court, ask them to give you the day off." "No!" "I'm fine." "I keep telling you, I don't want help." "I just want to be normal." "Normal people get beaten up!" "Yes." "They do." "She's sleeping." "And she's comfortable." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Latte, please, with an extra shot." "I'll bring it over." "The more I learn about this case, the more I realise what a bore I am." "I mean, look at them." "The three victims." "All professional, normal women, yet all leading these elaborate secret lives." "I thought I'd lived." "I realise I haven't, at all." "I cheated on a boyfriend once." "Yeah, but we've all done that." "Taken things we shouldn't have at parties, sometimes." "And maybe shoplifted." "You know, just little things, but it's not quite in the same league, is it?" "And then I cheated on the one I was cheating with." "And then I cheated on him, too." "None of them knew about each other." "I kept it up for the whole summer." "Juggling and lying." "And playing them off against one another." "Which kind of shocked me." "That I could do that." "It's getting a bit heavy, isn't it?" "But it's true." "Those poor women got attacked in the press, at the time, for being out there, on the net, making themselves available and I remember the coverage." "It was so full of judgment and contempt, as if they were somehow immoral or bad." "But they weren't." "They were all perfectly normal women." "With fantasies and desires, just like the rest of us." "They just had the guts... or the bad luck to act on them." "So what do you shoplift?" "Mobiles, keys and if you take your shoes off, thank you." "Step forward, sir." "Onto this side." "Up you go." "Turn around." "Yes." "What are you doing here?" "Just thought I'd get here a little early, offer you a few do's and don'ts, in case things get especially rough today." "Why?" "Are they likely to?" "Yeah." "Mr Lane, good morning." "Good to see you got here safely today, in one piece." "I'm assuming there were no serious accidents on the way." "No-one ran into you?" "Nothing... fell from the sky and landed on your head?" "My lord." "I say this, because if we are to believe what the defence has told us, we should put the Guinness Book of Records on alert, for, Mr Lane, you are clearly the unluckiest man in the world." "I'm going to enjoy this." "Everywhere you go, terrible misfortune happens, and none of it your fault." "You are simply, as my learned colleague informed us a 'perfectly innocent man looking for love'." "Am I right?" "Yes." "First, a woman you met on the internet and greatly liked," "Holly Jackson, invited you to her house on the... 4th of February, not in the hope of starting a deep and meaningful romantic relationship, as you hoped, but... merely for extra-marital sex." "Something you weren't interested in at all." "Am I right?" "That's correct." "And this was something you could never have seen coming?" "Even though she'd stated quite clearly in an email exchange only three days prior to your meeting that... 'with the right person, in the right situation," "I could be very naughty'?" "I didn't take that seriously." "Yes or no?" "No." "Because you were an innocent man looking for love?" "Yes." "And finding that love wasn't on the menu, you made your excuses and left?" "Correct." "All of which would have been fine, if Ms Jackson had not subsequently been found brutally murdered with you having been the last known person to have visited her." "Yes." "So you can imagine what conclusions these witnesses came to and it wasn't that you were 'a perfectly innocent man looking for love'." "Yes." "My, how the gods have been unkind to you." "God, sir." "Single." "One God." "Of course." "Silly of me." "Then came Anna Knight, another woman you met on the internet, who appeared to be after exactly the same thing as you, a committed relationship, but who rejected you after just one meeting." "What bad luck." "Yes." "Bad enough to want to follow her and find out why." "Only to discover that her motives were no purer than Ms Jackson's." "She was meeting another man." "Yes." "And what extraordinary bad luck that at precisely the moment you decided to follow her and were pinpointed at the scene of the crime by a mobile-telephone call, she was being murdered by a man for whom there is, unfortunately," "not a single... shred of evidence." "Is this... really true?" "Yes." "I suppose one shouldn't be surprised, then, that this run of inexplicably bad luck should continue with the third victim, Rebecca Cheung, where, once again, you happened to be the last person she arranged to meet before she died." "Is that really correct?" "Yes." "Made worse on this occasion by several witnesses who recalled seeing a person matching exactly your description at The Green Man pub with the victim the evening before she died." "A meeting you told the police never happened." "Now further compounded by the extraordinary misfortune that the CCTV cameras, which just happened to catch you going home, infuriatingly cut out on a time lapse at all the worst moments and, therefore, don't show you" "NOT hailing the minicab and NOT getting into the car." "Instead they show you talking to the driver, the car doubling back, the car overtaking Rebecca Cheung and stopping 300 yards ahead, leading people to the inconvenient, but inescapable conclusion that you were actually in that taxi" "and lying in wait for Rebecca Cheung before murdering her." "We've already explained ..." "Correct?" "Yes or no?" "I didn't hail that taxi." "Answer the question!" "Correct or not?" "Yes, it's correct!" "All right?" "Everything you say is correct!" "Now perhaps you actually want to ask a few questions to which you DO want to know the answer, instead of all this rhetorical crap, with your smart-arse voice and your raised bloody eyebrows!" "Mr Lane!" "It's a total disrespect to me and a total disrespect to the family of the victims." "Is that so?" "Members of the jury, the day I am admonished for disrespecting the victims' families... by the man who stands accused of murdering them... is a sad day indeed." "Thank you, Mr Lane." "No further questions." "Well, well, where is he?" "Over there." "Jackson, Tahir." "Good afternoon, sir." "Well, go on." "Get in." "I will do." "Thanks very much." "Bye-bye." "Mr Tackana?" "Takana." "Take a seat." "OK." "How are you today, sir?" "Fine." "Thank you." "My, we have a lot of notes on you." "OK." "Let me see..." "Five years ago, you applied for an I-130." "Is that correct?" "An immigration visa based on the fact that you have a family member in the United States?" "Yes." "So why has it taken that long?" "OK." "I can see why." "It went from USCIC headquarters in DC, then it was referred to the National Visa Center in New Hampshire." "Yes." "So?" "And?" "Do you want the long version or the short version?" "Short, dear." "I'm an old man." "There may not be time for the long version." "I'm in." "The New Hampshire Head Office decided my circumstances were exceptional and my application should be expedited." "Well... that's wonderful!" "Well done, you!" "America!" "Wonderful!" "Living In America" "You've been in a lot lately." "Have I made an impression on you, then?" "No." "I just wondered if you'd be interested in our '12 for the price of 10' saver pack?" "No, thanks." "I'm almost done." "We had a lord, a penniless one, with substance-abuse issues, if his skin was anything to go by." "There was a scientist, who'd done important work with pacemakers." "An Armenian, who didn't speak a word of English." "A woman, who'd just had a boob job, and was keeping low until the stitches were out." "There was an old lady, deaf as a post." "Like you say," "'Liquorice Allsorts'." "And, miraculously, all of one mind." "Yes." "So how long did it take you to reach the verdict?" "Two, three hours." "Wow." "Quick." "It was just so clear-cut and so utterly straightforward." "And don't forget, we still had that piece of evidence to help convict him." "Unlike you." "You'll have a much tougher job." "That piece of evidence?" "Right." "Well, don't tell me." "You know I can't." "It was ruled inadmissible by the Court of Appeal." "Although why..." "I'll never know." "You don't think it should have been?" "No." "Well, I'd still prefer it if you didn't tell me." "What you don't know can't hurt you." "Right, because what if I told you and it were to influence you?" "And then you would influence your fellow jurors." "It could change everything." "You really think it could?" "It's that powerful?" "This turns everything on its head." "One could argue, that if it really is that powerful, you have a responsibility to tell me." "I have a right to know." "I suppose one could argue that." "You can trust me." "I promise." "OK." "You didn't hear this." "The first victim ..." "Holly Jackson." "Where Alan always insisted he never went into her bedroom, where the murder took place ..." "Right." "Well... in that bedroom, there was a brown throw." "An open-weave, fringed trim, two metres by one metre." "Right." "From Marks  Spencer's." "I even remember the price." "£29.99." "Well..." "The police found traces of it in Lane's car." "What?" "It was the key piece of evidence in the first trial." "The prosecution's entire case was based on it." "So why is it no longer admissible?" "You have to give Alan's legal team credit." "They kept digging and digging away." "Until they found something." "What did they find?" "You won't believe it." "The same forensics officer that examined Alan Lane's car had come from a domestic burglary earlier that day." "And..." "It turns out, by some freak coincidence... the owners of the house had exactly the same throw on their sofa that Holly Jackson had on her bed." "In the Court of Appeal, the forensics officer swore, under oath, he'd never set foot in the sitting room, but, because he couldn't prove that contamination hadn't occurred with a fibre becoming attached to his crime-scene bag," "as he put it down somewhere in the house or his equipment and then transferred it to Alan Lane's car, the verdict was thrown out." "Do you know how well these officers are trained?" "How experienced this one was?" "There is no way on earth that Alan Lane's car was contaminated by fibres from another crime scene." "That was Holly Jackson's throw." "But all that remained was for independent forensics analysis to show that the fibres from the two throws really were identical." "That was enough to show that it really could, in theory, have come from the earlier crime scene." "And the case was headed for retrial." "And now he'll almost certainly get off." "God." "There." "Now you know." "Don't you wish you didn't?" "Or that we'd never bumped into one another." "Or started talking." "That we had never met." "No, no, no." "No." "No, I'm..." "I'm glad." "What are you going to do?" "I don't know." "Come on." "We should get back." "It's the summing up." "You go ahead." "I'll be right there." "It's done." "Good." "How do you feel?" "Terrible." "You know why you're doing this." "It's the right thing." "We all agreed." "I know." "I just didn't expect to... like him." "Mr Mallory?" "Members of the jury... enough." "It is a measure of the sophistication of the society we live in that we have even come thus far." "That a trial such as this should been queried and appealed and retried and that is a society I am proud to live in, but... enough now." "I accept that we do not have any direct evidence of Alan Lane's guilt." "No CCTV camera catching him in the act or a witness, who was in the actual room, but, let's face it, we do have everything else and when you take..." "It's true." "We do have a legal system that is nobly predicated upon the presumption of innocence." "Instead, Alan Lane has been subjected to a relentless presumption of guilt." "A shocking collusion between our media, our judiciary and law-enforcement agencies that has resulted in an abject miscarriage of justice that should shame us all..." "do not be fooled by this." "Alan Lane, as you have seen for yourselves in this trial, with shocking clarity, is a man with an explosive temper and a disturbing history of violence... from the minute Alan Lane was wrongfully arrested, he was grotesquely daubed a weirdo... inside the house, in the back of the taxi, I ask you," "is there really anyone here who really believes any... he was denied a fair investigation." "He was denied a fair hearing." "He was denied a fair trial..." "Alan Lane was the last person to see all three victims alive... why?" "Because..." "..he was also the first person to see all of them dead..." "we all wanted this case closed." "Because we were uncomfortable with what it said about us." "Our secret lives, our fears and frustrations and our loneliness." "So I look to the 12 of you to restore all our pride in the judicial system and the public's faith in trial by jury." "By returning the right verdict, here today." "Right." "Members of the jury, there you have it." "The time has come for you to retire and consider your verdict." "You should strive to reach a unanimous one." "You must also choose a foreman to preside over your deliberations." "It would be best if you did that straightaway." "If you follow the usher, he will take you to the jury room." "Right, ladies and gentlemen." "I'm going to need all mobile phones, please, pagers, BlackBerries." "I'd also like to draw your attention to the bell." "If you need anything ... food, drink, visit to the toilets." "Exhibits will be brought to you, as and when." "You also have fresh coffee and tea in the Thermos." "Any questions?" "Right." "Well, good luck." "Well, perhaps I should start the ball rolling." "We heard the judge." "We'd better elect a foreman." "Now, I..." "I suggest that those of you who want to be considered as jury foreman put themselves forward by raising their hands now." "Yeah, I don't mind." "Me, too." "Right." "I..." "I suppose we could have speeches and ballot papers, but I think that's going too far." "Our time is too precious, so..." "I suggest that the three candidates turn their backs and... the rest of us vote for our choice." "Yeah?" "So let's start." "Those of us who want..." "Ann." "Ann, vote now." "And those of us who want..." "Derek." "Vote now." "And those of us who want ..." "Paul." "Paul." "And the result is..." "Paul ... narrowly." "Well, thank you." "Thank you, everybody who voted for me." "Is that what one says?" "Who knows?" "Well, I notice it's quarter to five already and we've had a long day." "How would everybody feel if we started in earnest tomorrow?" " Good idea." " Fine by me." "We could always have a quick vote now." "What do you think?" "On what?" "Just to see where we stand." "Who knows?" "We might already have a unanimous verdict." "We could wrap it up by tonight." "I somehow doubt that." "Why?" "The way that nutter went off in court today," "I thought we were going to have a fourth murder on our hands." "OK." "All those who find the defendant guilty as charged, raise your hands." "And who finds him innocent?" "Any abstentions?" "Well... we have a hung jury." "Surprise, surprise." "A seriously well-hung jury." "Then that is the challenge facing us." "To get one camp to persuade the other, until we reach unanimity." "Tomorrow will be an eventful day." "I suggest we get all the rest we can." "How about an earlier start?" "Nine o'clock?" "See you then." "Aye, aye, skipper." "See you tomorrow." "All right." "Take care." "See you tomorrow." "Well done." "OK." "See you tomorrow." "See you tomorrow." "Heathrow?" "Yeah." "Right, then." "Tahir, hey!" "Hey." "Hello." "He's coming!" "And?" "We've been waiting all day." "They said yes!" "It's very cold in Nebraska." "He'll need a proper snow-proof coat, won't he?" "Definitely!" "And gloves." "Yes, here we are." "Thick gloves." "And a hat?" "He'd want one of those." "Beautiful." "My!" "Will you look at these?" "Goodness!" "I've driven tractors with less tread than these!" "And feel that fur." "I'm guessing a nine." "Don't close yet!" "Here we are!" "Excuse me, I was wondering..." "I've written postcards and I was wondering ..." "Sorry." "Excuse me." "I see you're going to Sardinia." "No." "Sorry." "No." "Excuse me." "I was wondering if you could send these postcards." "It's nothing dodgy and you get ten quid for the trouble." "Thanks." "Thank you." "I really appreciate that." "Thanks." "Thanks." " Hello." " Hello." "Hello." "Can I speak to Sadam?" "Hello?" "Hello." "I'm married to an American now." "So I don't see any of the boys from back home any more." "We'll all go for a beer." "That's what I mean." "Like my name." "It's David now." "David?" "But money is tight and people are scared and it's hard enough making a living out here as a Black East African, without being a Muslim called Sadam." "Listen, I gotta go." "So, out of nowhere, one of the jurors comes up with the idea of a snap vote." "Suddenly, I have to come up with a verdict." "Which way did you go?" "Well, I didn't." "I abstained." "Why?" "You must have an opinion." "I do." "Of course I do." "But it's not my opinion that's important, is it?" "It's yours." "But I'm not in the jury room, you are." "But only as you, there to deliver your vote." "I keep telling you, which is why you've got to do the work." "God, the burdens of responsible citizenship." "I pay my taxes." "I recycle my rubbish." "Isn't that enough?" "Joke!" "Come on." "Let's do it!" "So explain this, triangulation thing again?" "That's just the cell-site analysis." "And the difference between a subdural haematoma and a diffuse axonal injury is...?" "One's from a blow to the head, the other's from strangulation." "She said, sounding like she knows which is which." "I've got a friend who's a doctor, I'll give them a ring." "And I need more wine." "Me, too." "He did do it, didn't he?" "Is that what you think?" "Isn't that what you think?" "That's not the point." "I'll get the wine." "Another bottle, please." "Over there." "Over there?" "Right." "Has caused much public debate." "Well, the debate itself is predicted to run late into the night." "If MPs vote in favour of the bill, then it is widely thought that this vote could kick-start a radical overhaul of what critics have been calling 'an outdated, inefficient and unreliable institution'." "A growing number of defenders of the jury service are calling it 'one public spending cut too many'." "We can now cross live to our political correspondent ..." "You're up, huh?" "Surprise." "Came back a few days early." "I'm sorry." "Hey." "What the hell's been going on?" "I'm sorry." "The third act of Cousin Kate was well-advanced by the time Mrs Moore re-entered the club." "Windows were barred, lest the servants should see their memsahibs acting... and the heat was consequently immense." "One electric fan... revolved like a wounded bird, another was out of order." "Disinclined to return to the audience, she went into the billiard room, where she was greeted by, 'I want to... '" "'see the real India.'" "What do I do, Mum?" "What do I do?" "Do I tell them?" "Good night." "Fifty quid says you're back here tonight." "You have put me in a terrible position." "Knowing what I now know I should report you to the authorities." "She's got the hots for him." "How dare you!" "I wish you'd thought longer and harder about the implications of what you've done." "This is information which puts a completely different perspective on the case." "Good luck." "Do you find the defendant guilty... or not guilty?"