Beyond street gangs and drunken upper-class dining clubs, it is generally regarded as wrong for a man to make sexual gestures to a woman he does not know.
Where the man is a police officer at a murder trial and the woman is a juror, it would be inexcusable but that is what is alleged to have happened in a recent case at Nottingham Crown Court.
Detective Constable Ivor Messiah, sitting in the gallery, is said to have puckered his lips at the juror, a brunette in her mid-thirties, blown her a kiss, and then subtly progressed in his repertoire of charades to making a ring with his index-finger and thumb and poking his other index-finger in and out of it.
Nine days into the murder trial, in which a solicitor was accused of hiring an assassin to kill his business partner, the juror, referred to by the judge as “Miss X” passed a note of her phone number to a police officer during a break and asked him to give it to the man in the public gallery who had been flirting with her for several days.
The trial judge, Mrs Justice Dobbs, held a special four-day hearing on the matter.
She found that Miss X had tried to give DC Messiah her number after he had “made a hand movement, like a phone, to his ear”. The note messenger chosen by Miss X was an officer she had seen in the gallery with Messiah but her intended courier refused to deliver it and reported the matter to the court.
The judge ensured that all the jurors had been made aware of the allegations that DC Messiah “had made suggestive gestures of a sexual nature”. They were asked if they were disposed to continue and all but one said yes so he and Miss X were discharged. The judge noted that DC Messiah claimed that he had had “no contact with the juror” and could not be the person who had made gestures to Miss X.
The remaining ten jurors went on to find John Cort and Brian Farrell guilty of murdering Vina Patel, a partner at Cort’s firm. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Jurors should not be the subject of ardent attention from anyone in court. In 1993 Paul Powell was in the gallery at Cardiff Crown Court when the jury, including “an attractive, smartly dressed young lady”, returned to give their verdict. Powell loudly wolf-whistled the woman and spent the night in jail for contempt.
For a lawyer to consort amorously with a juror is scandalous because this risks justice being perverted by love or lust.
In 1930, during prohibition, Theodore Bruener was disbarred after he was caught in a four-hour, alcohol-fuelled, riverbank sex session with a juror on the case in which he was an advocate.
The Washington Supreme Court declined to record the details of their sexual encounter saying these would be of interest only to “avid readers of erotic literature”. It is sufficient to know, however, that Mr Bruener’s techniques of juror persuasion were not those traditionally taught in law school.
Gary Slapper is Professor of Law at The Open University.
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Full article: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/columnists/article7142101.ece
