There’s no soul, there’s no emotion, there’s no love, there’s no nothing that comes out of Crown Courts. And the judges as well. The judges are there to do a job, they’re not there to get emotionally involved, if they were they’d be taking sides.
So they’re, they’re quite distant if you like and they’re there just to hear the facts. And I think you have to take that on board that, that the trial is not a happy time at all.
No.
It’s not a happy place to be. It’s not a happy environment. And you’re in limbo really when it, when it comes to a death where there’s going to be a trial. You’re in limbo for that year because you can’t move on.
Do you mid saying a bit about the court case now?
Yes, the court case was horrific from start to finish. It’s a day thing that you have to do. His trial went on for two and a half weeks. A court is a horrible place to have to go. It’s cold. You have lots of other people there in, in different courtrooms for different reasons. The whole, the whole thing is just negative. There’s not one positive that come out of it. When you’re there, we had a family room so we were very lucky with our family liaison officer and a police officer, that we had a room where we could go to... away from his family. Because they, there was actually two up on trial, one was for murder and there was another person who was up for accessory for murder. So, at the beginning there were two people.
Connected with your son?
Connected with my son. And in, in the trial one was found not guilty to all charges and walked. But obviously his family were there at the time and, and then the person that killed my son, his family were there. And because he [the defendant] had lied so much about the course of events that led to my son’s death they had obviously, because it was their son, just got totally embroiled in what he’d said and totally believed him, even when he was found guilty and the judge said that, you know, he’d planned this all along, he knew exactly what he was doing. Even now they’re still very much that, you know, it was an accident and my son came towards him and it was because my son came towards him in a threatening manner that he felt out of fear he had to stab him.
So we had to have the whole thing, where we were in the public gallery with them. And the public galleries are small. And you just have a walkway between two families.
How awful.
And you have the intimidation, the stares, and everything that goes on with a trial really. And you have to be so strong not to, and you have to be so strong, or we had to for Kevin because we knew that it was vital that the jury heard the truth and the facts.
And then of course you have to listen to the defence, just knocking your son down. And trying to discredit him and make him out to be a liar and somebody that he’s not.
How awful.
To say somebody who’s lying and you have to sit through two and a half weeks knowing that that person’s lying through his teeth.
How terrible.
And at one stage because we were sitting where the witness stand is I was feet, feet from him.
I mean, what was the verdict in the end?
The verdict was, was unanimous and it was very, very quick. And considering that they had to do it on two people, for accessory to murder and murder, it was very, very quick and I suppose if you divided that in half it must have taken them two hours, a minimum, just two hours to convict. Because like I say, all along they’d made their minds up.
And it was guilty.
Of murder?
Of murder. But the other one was not guilty. He was up on three charges: affray, accessory to murder, and the third one, he walked free. But, to be fair, he turned it round to be on our side.
So were you satisfied with the verdict?
I was satisfied, yeah.
Yes.
