COURT 1 AT THE OLD BAILEY

COURT 1 AT THE OLD BAILEY

Some of history's most notorious killers have been tried in Court One of the Old Bailey, which is 100 years old this week. We went behind the security screens, where the public is never allowed, to see how justice is served
By Cole Moreton
Sunday, 25 February 2007 The INDEPENDENT
 

The killing happened a few miles away. Out there on the high street where young men carry cheap guns and lose their temper. Not here, inside the most famous criminal court in the world, where the voices are always low and scrupulously polite, where wigs and gowns are worn and those same young men are tried for murder.

They have been for 100 years now. The Old Bailey will celebrate its centenary with a visit from the Queen on Tuesday. It has hosted some of history's most gripping trials, but the case being heard on Friday, in one of the 18 court rooms, was going nowhere.

The accused had not shown up. There was a problem getting him from his remand cell to the Bailey. And while his relatives waited to find out what was happening, they looked utterly lost. The defence counsel, in a black gown and a silver wig that appeared about to slip off his head, was talking to the judge in impenetrable legalese. The prosecution lawyers were muttering and scribbling. The usher frowned and said, "Court will rise". And everyone filed out. Except the family. They didn't know where to go.

Courts are bewildering places, but none more so than this one. Everything about it is designed to be intimidating, from the stone walls that rise like a fortress to the grand marble halls within, and their scowling murals of Moses and King Alfred. The Central Criminal Court, as it is properly called, was built in 1907 when the law was synonymous with empire. "Right lives by law," says a motto carved into the wall, "and law subsists by power."

The Queen will see a glorious remnant of the world of her great-grandfather, King Edward VII, when she visits. "When you enter there is an immediate sense of being somewhere very important indeed," said Charles Henty, secondary or administrator of the place on behalf of the City of London Corporation, which uniquely helps to fund the court. "Look at the materials: the stone that speaks of solidity, and the marble that was chosen as synonymous with cleanliness. The idea was that nothing should taint the law."

Then there is Justice, the gilded statue of a woman with a sword and scales on top of the dome above the building. "Twelve feet tall and weighing 22 tons," said Mr Henty. She's a heavy lady, in every sense. Not blindfolded as people think (the shadows make it look that way from below) but eyes wide open, looking over the city streets. The law she represents is not the law that operates down there, where those sullen young men will sell you a stolen SIM card for the price of a Big Mac and stick you up for it again on the way out. Hers is the law of the privileged and learned - and that is clearest in the most notorious trial room of them all, Court One.

Sitting inside brings you intimately close to a world of butchered wives and drains clogged with body parts. Here is the dock where Crippen stood, and Peter Sutcliffe, and Dennis Nilsen. It is also a place where the Establishment brought death down too, on the likes of Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged. And here are the oak panels that deadened the words of Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, Tory grandees impaled on their perjury and sent down to cells once occupied by the wartime traitor Lord Haw-Haw.

The judge, dressed in scarlet, sits to one side of a golden sword of justice that hangs in the centre of the back wall like a cross on an altar. Natural light seems to flood down from the circular window overhead, but it is an illusion: behind the frosted glass are huge floodlights. Once you know that, the room seems claustrophobic. The hushed, mannered voices and arcane terms seem part of a conspiracy. All power and might belong to the Crown, the room says. What hope is there if it thinks you're guilty? How must that feel if you stand in the dock knowing you are not?

To the public, an appearance in Court One can itself seem like evidence of guilt because this is the Theatre Royal of crime, the grand stage on which the worst of humanity has taken a bow. No wonder the old lags - the armed robbers and career villains who populated the Bailey in the fictional days of Rumpole - still say that if you go down at Court One, at least you're going down for a proper crime. Recently the Bailey has dealt only with homicide and terrorism. So no more Archers here? "Unlikely," said Mr Henty, a 43-year-old former army major. "There is so much murder out there these days. Someone has to deal with it."

A dapper chap in a black pinstripe suit, Mr Henty has offices in the large part of the Bailey that the public doesn't see. (Only lawyers, jurors and "interested parties" understand the full grandeur of E W Mountord's building. And some proceedings are closed: Court Two is used for high-security terrorist cases, and I can't write the detail of what happened in Court One on Friday for legal reasons. Not that I really understood it anyway.)

This was the site of the infamous Newgate prison, and the trials of Daniel Defoe and Oscar Wilde. Now the Bailey hosts 1,500 trials a year, most in the newer part of the building damaged by an IRA bomb in 1973. A shard of glass was left embedded high in the wall as a reminder - and so the memory of a terrible time was turned into a symbol, and lost some of its sting. That's the way they do things at the Bailey. You'll never hear a judge break down and cry, as one did in America last week over the body of Anna Nicole Smith.

The language, rituals and costumes seem designed to preserve the mystery of the law and keep it in the hands of the elite, but Charles Henty insisted the support services worked hard to see that victims, relatives and witnesses did not feel excluded. "The Bailey is meant to be a service to the public, not the judiciary." But the anachronisms were useful, he said. "They do mean the court itself is surprisingly calm and detached. You want to keep emotion out of it and maintain objectivity."

Murals show figures deemed to have played a part in the forming of English law, such as King John signing Magna Carta. One motto proclaims: "The law of the wise is a fountain of life." But back in that murder trial on Friday morning the fountain felt more like a stiff pool of treacle.

The prison service had forgotten to send the defendant. The judge, who had been nagging the jury for lateness, now dismissed it for the morning with a few superior, patronising words but no real explanation. The lawyers had decided in private that one was not necessary. The jurors, who had clearly suffered enough tedium behind the scenes to cease being impressed or intimidated by wigs, gowns, accents or century-old marble halls, muttered as they filed out, and the words of one man echoed louder than they should have: "Who," he grumbled, "do these people think they are?"