Jury service - Day 6

"Have you, the jury, reached verdicts on either or both of the charges laid against the Defendant?"

"Yes."

"On the first charge, of vaginal rape, have you reached a verdict on which at least ten of you are agreed?"

"Yes."

"How do you find the Defendant; guilty, or not guilty?"

"Guilty."

"Was that a unanimous verdict, or a majority verdict?"

"Majority."

"And what was the majority?"

"10 guilty, 2 not guilty."

"So, a majority of 10 to 2?"

"Yes."

"And on the second charge, of oral rape, have you reached a verdict on which at least ten of you are agreed?"

"No."

"Are you likely, with further time, to reach a verdict?"

"No."

"Very well. Given the time taken to reach this point, I will discharge you from reaching a verdict on the second charge. Thank you for your time."

Thus ended 8 hours and 5 minutes of deliberation over 3 days, on top of the 4 days of the trial itself. We were taken back to the jury loungue and re-registered for entry into further cases but, through either good fortune or benevolent planning, none of us were called to a new trial this afternoon, which is just as well, given the general emotional exhaustion on the part of the entire jury. Date rape cases are among the hardest to have to decide, for the obvious reason that it almost always boils down to the word of one person against that of another. You can see why I've been bemoaning my lot.

The charges were brought by a young Latvian girl - Irina Idiyatulina, the Claimant - who had been working in the UK as a part-time waitress for about the previous year. Last summer (18th July, to be precise), she was picked up by a Moldovan immigrant - Oleg Vrabie, the Defendant - that she had met in Stratford a few days before and taken back to the shared house in East Ham in which he had a room. They proceeded to have a few drinks with some of the other tenants, chatting in Russian - the only language they all had in common - and continuing to drink until late in the evening, getting through at least a bottle and a half of Starka in the process. Towards midnight, they ended up in his room on the second floor. A little while later, she was seen to run out of the house with Oleg hot on her heels. Refusing his offers to see her home, she called the police, flagging down a car in the midst of her call to find out where she was to inform the despatch officer. On hearing her allegations, some policeman approached the house, arresting Oleg outside and, given the nature of her story, also all the men resident at the address.

Those are the bare facts of the case. It came to light during the trial that certain additional facts weren't being disputed by either the Defence or the Prosecution; for example, that the DNA of semen found in Irina's vagina was a match for Oleg, and that Irina's blood alcohol level at the time she was picked up by the police was 2.5 times the legal driving limit. Irina was examined by a medical officer, who prepared a body map from her examination showing all bruises and lacerations visible on Irina at the time of the examination, as well as a series of photographs cataloguing the major examples. Irina gave her statement to the police on what is known as an ABE (Achieving Best Evidence) video. A little later, Oleg was questioned by a Project Sapphire officer, and a statement transcribed from this interview. Statements were taken from all the men arrested, all of whom were released except Oleg, as he was the only person specifically named in Irina's statement that the police had found at the address. In addition, photographs were taken of the areas of the house at which the events occurred according to Irina's statement. Later on, additional witness statements were obtained from other tenants at the address.

This is what we had to go on, then. This, and the verbal testimony given in evidence during the trial by the Claimant, the one witness who appeared at trial, the medical officer and the police officer who complied the statement and, in fact, was handling the case and, finally, The Defendant, who gave evidence in spite of there being no legal obligation for him to do so. It would have been impossible to defend him if he had not done so, as we quickly realised as we were led through the evidence, but he could well have declined to give evidence if the Defence felt that the Crown's case was too weak to prosecute him successfully.

Without going through all the highly relevant but dramatically tedious minutiae of the case, it's possible to get a sense of the reasoning the jury accepted to come to the verdict that was given.

The Prosecution opened with Irina, and allowed her to tell her story of the excuse Oleg gave to get her back to the house, the rather surprising inclusion of drinks in his plans for her evening, the deliberate steering of her rather drunk form up to the vicinity of his bedroom, the increasingly violent assault that escalated to strangulation and eventual rape, the subsequent oral rape and then the attempted rape by one of the other men who had been in the garden before she managed to alert the house to her distress, get her things together and get out of the house to call the police. Throughout her evidence, given behind a screen to isolate her from the Defendant and translated between English and Latvian - which slowed things up immensely, as you can imagine - she was consistent and believable, particularly when cross-examined by the Defence. She exhibited genuine surprise when it was suggested that she had been flirting with all the men, kissing Oleg on a number of occasions and even fondling his penis underneath his shorts. Even when confronted by an apparent discrepancy in her account under oath and her original statement, she maintained her version of events without any apparent doubt, and it was then discovered that it was the Defence who had made the mistake, which she had corrected them on. The one witness called not only seemed to corroborate certain telling elements of Irina's account, such as the sounds of a struggle from the room in which Irina would have been and the presence of the second rapist whose identity Irina eventually recalled but who was never found by the police, but she also gave clear signs of being intimidated by the Defendant herself, having to be cajoled by the Prosecution into identifying him by name, preferring to refer to Oleg as 'him' or 'the one' throughout.

By contrast, Oleg's evidence - translated from Russian - was damning. His statement to the police on his arrest was filled with outright lies. He gave a false name to the arresting officer, and it transpires that he is an illegal immigrant who has already been deported once and has managed to find his way back into the country. The name he gave was that of a legal immigrant, who had stressed he was to use it for work purposes only. He strenuously denied that he had had sex with Irina at all, in spite of being reminded that samples would have been taken from both Irina and him, and that both their clothes were in evidence to be examined. He placed himself outside in the garden at the time of the putative second rape, when another of the men arrested had seen him on the second floor dressed in nothing but a towel moments after Irina began screaming. He gave the second assailant's identity as Valiera, which agreed with Irina's statement, but Valiera was never found, and this would pose problems for his defence as the trial approached.

If his statement was the first nail in his coffin, his evidence under oath in court was the rest of the box, the lid, the the hole and a shovel for the dirt. It was absolutely riddled with blatant fibs and fabrications, which gave his Defence pause for grimace on at least one occasion. He conceded that they had consensual sex, in direct contradiction to his statement to the police, and then claimed that he only lied to the police because he didn't understand what they were telling him and was merely trying to get everyone off with as little hassle as possible. This, despite the clear transcript showing that not only was he told the charges against him on three seperate occasions and confirmed that he understood the charges, but he even said "I did not rape her" at one point, showing clear understanding of his situation. He claimed that he had left Irina after they had had sex to have a shower and that he came back to find Nico - one of the other tenants - trying to rape her, and pulled him off her. Given that Valiera had never been apprehended, it seemed to us that he had decided to substitute Nico in his place, as he was known to have been in the house, having been arrested on the night. He told us that he had left the house after Irina had run off to get something to eat and then to go see his girlfriend, but he then went on to explain that he must have lost the sandals he was wearing when he first ran from the police. He had clearly forgotten that the arresting officer's statement was clear on the fact that, when first sighted, Oleg was barefoot. He told us he had pulled on the same shorts and shirt that he had been wearing before getting naked for the consensual sex in his account, but then - and this is where I spotted his Defence wince - he was shown a photo of his room to confirm that the towel he had been wearing was in shot, and he did so and then pointed at a black tangle of clothing in shot and told us that those were the clothes had had been wearing before the sex, obviously thinking this would support his version, completely forgetting that the photographs had been taken after his arrest when, by his own account, he had been wearing those same clothes. His version of events kept changing depending on what he remembered of the evidence presented at trial and the story he had concocted to create doubt in the jurors' minds.

Most telling for me, and the single realisation that swayed me personally from undecided to a Guilty verdict, was this; his account would have us believe, at the same time, that Irina had consented to sex and was sober, rational, calm and awake enough afterwards to discuss having a shower and allowing him to go first so she could take her time afterwards AND that she had lied in her account about knowing that the second rapist was the man called Valiera because she said she was sobbing and too lost to even run away to have noticed who the second rapist was. Either she was aware enough to have had little likelihood of recognising the second rapist beyond any doubt or she was to disconsolate to notice. Their acknowledgement of her inability to be sure of the second rapist's identity was, to me, certain proof that there would have had to have been a reason for her emotional state that could only reasonably be explained by her account.

It seems so simple now that I've been through the deliberation and have laid out all my ducks in a row like that but the truth of the matter is that it takes hours and hours of analysis and questioning and argument and refutation to get to that point and, for 2 of us at least, even all of that wasn't sufficient to be sure of guilt. It was interesting that one of the two - both men, for whatever that means - changed his mind on seeing the Defendant's reaction to the verdict, and was relieved that we had reached a majority in spite of his dissension. Whether that is a coping mechanism to allow him to live with the thought that a man he found innocent is going to prison, or whether he saw something more than the mere resignation that I observed, is impossible to know, I guess.

I have no basis for comparison yet, but I believe that we were a good jury; I don't think that the Defendant could have received a more fair and hard-earned verdict. Everyone looked hard at the evidence, tried hard to avoid speculation, and steered cleared of personal attacks and bullying to sway the others. It was a fascinating exercise, in itself, to see the different approaches and arguments favoured by different people. It was clear when personal bias was playing a significant role in a decision, or when someone's intuitive arrival at their conviction was irrefutable with logical analysis. It was perhaps expected that, with few exceptions, the jurors who began deliberation with a clear verdict in mind that did not change during deliberation were the older individuals, and that those whose initial preference was to express an unwillingness to state a verdict either way were the young among us. Again, it's easy to cite the intransigence of the elderly, and to forget that they have a wealth of experience that sometimes acts as an efficient bullshit filter, which the rest of us have yet to develop, leaving us with plodding logic to reach the same goal. I'd guess it's a mixture of those two elements that gives rise to the behaviour.

That this has been a draining, exhausting, daunting experience for all of us is beyond question. Without exception, we have all been relieved at avoiding another case this afternoon, so soon after being dismissed from the previous one, and we have all lost sleep or weight or concentration during the course of the trial. I value the knowledge I've gained of the process and of human nature under jury conditions, but I still firmly believe I could have learned it all with any case, and I still wish I'd been spared this particular category. I guess only another crack at it will give me an answer, one way or another. I can say with conviction, though, that I'm happy to wait quite a while for that. Meanwhile, I go back to the jury lounge and hope for a nice long read.

Sentence is being passed on 23rd March, and I will append that when it is available.