Mary Prior KC and Caroline Bray successfully defended a man charged with murder, armed robbery, and fraud. The prosecution offered no evidence on day two of the murder trial and then at the end of a three weeks trial on armed robbery and fraud, the Judge agreed with the submissions made by the defence teams that there was no case for the defendant to answer and all charges resulted in not guilty verdicts.
The man, SP, had been prosecuted with two others. The allegation was that this was a vicious group attack murder with knives and weapons, an armed robbery and fraud. Mary and Caroline’s client was first on the Indictment so they did the vast majority of the questioning in the case. The prosecution case was that SP went to the address of a co-defendant with a weapon and used it to beat the man to rob him of his bank card before involving himself in a brutal murder. The case relied on circumstantial evidence. There was substantial expert evidence, a blood splatter expert, CCTV analysis, mark comparison and pathology.
Mary successfully argued that one of the experts that the Crown sought to call was not suitably qualified to undertake marks comparison. Due to highly skillful cross-examination of all experts the case against SP was significantly undermined. A very careful analysis of thousands of pages of unused material revealed that there was evidence that the item being carried was in fact more likely to be a selfie-stick as the defence had argued from the outset of the case. A submission that there was no case to answer was successfully made by Mary and Caroline and the jury were direction to return not guilty verdicts on all offences.
Mary and Caroline worked tirelessly to consider all of the unused material, the evidence and to challenge the expert evidence. They were instructed by The Johnson Partnership.
Further information
For more information from the crime team, contact clerks@36crime.co.uk
