Read Online Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny - Free Book Online Page A

own firmly established rules, but however and wherever a trial finally takes place, it is preceded by a police investigation and the arrest of a suspect who, except in cases of murder, is either granted bail or held on remand. In Britain the decision as to whether a case goes to trial has traditionally been made by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the government’s chief legal executive (who, since 1985, presides over the Crown Prosecution Service). Cases of murder, however, almost invariably end up before a judge and jury, and, until 1972, this meant
    that cases outside London would be heard at a session of the Assizes the courts to which High Court judges made their ‘circuits’ several 32 / the trial times a year, travelling across the country in closed-off railway carriages, and living in virtual seclusion in judges’ residences in all the major cities where they dispensed justice.
    The purpose of any criminal trial, whether conducted under the accusatorial system (as in the UK and USA, where the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt) or by the inquisitorial Napoleonic Code (as in most European countries, where the judge plays a much more active role), is to establish guilt or innocence. In theory, facts alone determine this end, although judges can affect the outcome both by their questions and their interpolations, which more often than not indicate their own position and without doubt influence juries. Equally, the judge’s summing up will weigh heavily on any juror’s mind and, as this case would so classically prove, judges, too, are only human and can be swayed by appearances and are subject to emotion.
    The circumstances in which a trial is conducted, however, can be predetermined, and in Newcastle in 1968 provision had been made for frequent breaks in the proceedings and for the children’s relative comfort. The police officers and court staff on duty had received special instructions to keep the atmosphere quiet and treat both the children and their families gently. Nonetheless, a jury trial for murder is a fearful matter, deliberately grave in its procedure and awesome in its effect.
    The Newcastle Assizes were held in the Moot Hall, an early nineteenth-century stone building on the south side of the city where, until a new building was recently constructed, all court proceedings were conducted. The public gallery in the centre of the court, and the two side galleries, reserved on this occasion for the press, were only full on four days of the nine-day trial: day one, when the prosecutor, Rudolph Lyons, QC, presented his case; day six, for Mary’s examination-in-chief; day eight, for the judge’s summary to the jury, and day nine for the verdict. On those four days the next day’s schedule was posted in the press room at the end of each day’s proceedings there were reporters from all the main papers and many foreign ones, and there were queues from early morning for the public seats. On the other days, however, much of the public gallery was almost empty and most of the reporters stayed away.
    This obvious resistance to the case, in Newcastle and in the country as a whole, indicative of the difference in public attitudes between the sixties and the nineties, was to be reflected in the conduct of the trial and the atmosphere in the court throughout it. The court the judge and the lawyers and the psychiatrists, a number of whom attended in specially assigned seats from which they could observe the children, were of course intrigued, but the members of the public (who, twenty-five years later, would queue at dawn on every one of the seventeen days of the so-called “Bulger trial’) and the national press backed away from the case: in 1968 troubled children were not yet in vogue, and ‘evil’ was best ignored lest it might infect. Although the trial’s progress was briefly reported on news programmes, and commentaries appeared in the quality papers after the verdict, the BBC, in