A few thoughts on the Russell Brand case.

Or, rather, a case that didn’t involve Russell Brand, and what we can learn from it.

I’ve seen some posts on social media along the lines that Brand’s convictions are unsafe because, in all the cases, it was just his word against one complainant.

When I did jury service a few years ago, one of the cases I served on was in much the same category as Brand’s. Not involving a celebrity, and only one complainant instead of several. But, still, a set of charges of serious sexual offences where the only witness was the (alleged) victim.

Now, obviously I can’t say what went on on the jury room itself. That is, by law, forever secret. But I can talk about the case in general, I can talk about what happened in court (because that’s public anyway), and I can talk about what went on in my own head.

I have to admit that when I first heard the charges being read out and the case being introduced, my initial impression was that it would be very hard to convict someone based on the evidence of just one accuser. As anyone who has done jury service will tell you, one of the first things you are told is to avoid making any assumptions at the start of the case. And as anyone who has done jury service and is honest will tell you, it’s practically impossible to avoid that, because it’s human nature. So I went into this trial with a preconceived notion that the most likely result would be an acquittal.

Despite that, we convicted him.

And I am sure we made the right decision.

So, what changed?

Quite simply, over the course of the trial, it became more and more apparent that one person was telling the truth, and the other one wasn’t.

It wasn’t a single, magic bullet moment. It was a long drawn out process of examination and cross-examination by the barristers for prosecution and defence. Piece by piece, slowly, but inexorably, the prosecution dismantled the defendent’s account. But the defence couldn’t pull the accuser’s account apart.

This is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Media reporting of trials necessarily condenses everything into a website page or a three-minute broadcast summary. But a trial is not a fast-paced event. It unfolds over hours, and sometimes days. And every moment matters.

The jury in Russell Brand’s trial have had that experience. And, despite the best efforts of the media, none of us who were not there have anything more than a tiny fraction of all the evidence that they were exposed to and which they will have had to take into account when reaching their verdict.

I can’t tell you what went on in the jury room at the trial I served on. But, again, it’s a matter of public record that we took almost as long as Brand’s jury to reach a decision.

I don’t know what went on in the jury room at Brand’s trial. Nobody except the jury does, or ever will.

But if I was to surmise that they spent all of those hours wrestling with all of the evidence and witness testimony they’d seen and heard, and going over, and over, and over again, every little detail of everything that Brand had said and everything his accusers had said before finally reaching a unanimous decision, I think I’d be pretty close to the truth. Not that I can explain why, of course.

My experience of doing jury service on a sexual offence trial is one of the reasons why I’m confident that Brand’s jury got it right. Yes, juries do get it wrong, sometimes. But when they do, it’s almost always because they’ve been misled by the legal system or because key evidence was withheld from them. I don’t see any reason to believe that either of those was the case at Brand’s trial.

Russell Brand is a rapist. That’s a matter of legal fact, determined by one of the most robust legal processes we have. Social media criminologists and abuse apologists trying to cast doubt on that based on nothing more than media reports are only displaying their own ignorance and prejudice.