You Don't Know Me

This is why with the agreement and support of the Judge I now address you for a second time. However, to preserve the Defendant’s legal right to the final word, he is also to be permitted to address you, in reply to the prosecution speech.

I’m not going to go over everything that the Defendant has said. That would be to insult your intelligence. You have just heard everything he has to say. It is not for me simply to contradict what he says. You can see for yourselves where the weaknesses lie and it is for you to make of them what you will. No. I just make a few points for you to consider. As before. Accept them if you agree with them. Ignore them if you don’t.

It is important that we are absolutely clear about this from the start. We the Prosecution say that everything the Defendant has told you in his defence is a lie.

He lied in his interview with the police and he repeated those lies from the witness box when he gave evidence. Now though we have a whole new set of lies. Different lies from his evidence. Different lies from his interview. But, we say, lies nonetheless. From a Defendant who is, quite literally, making it up as he goes along.

Let us pause, if we may, to examine this recently invented story a little more thoroughly. Here are the problems you may think that the Defendant faces.

Firstly, there is no evidence at all that the gentleman, whom the Defendant is only able to name by the pseudonym, Face was shot dead, as the Defendant now claims. There is no, and I pause to emphasize this point, there is no evidence that this man even existed because the Defendant can tell us nothing else about this other, allegedly murdered, man. No evidence that drug dealers or indeed anybody was shot in a nightclub of the name identified by the Defendant, in the circumstances he relays. None. Not a shred, not a scrap. It is not simply invention, ladies and gentlemen, it is pure, uncorroborated fiction.

If two men, nay even one man, were to be shot dead in a nightclub, you can be sure, can you not, that there would be some evidence to support it? A police report perhaps? Or is it, as the Defendant would no doubt have you believe, a result of some sinister conspiracy by MI5 that the details have eluded the police? What about the press? Not a single news report or headline or column exists of a story describing the events that the Defendant has told you. Have they too been silenced by MI5?

And what about the mysterious and beguiling Kira? Where is she? Indeed who is she? Does she exist? Are we really being expected to believe that she, the Defendant’s girlfriend, was some kind of assassin recruited by the Secret Services? Never, I venture to suggest, has such unadulterated rubbish been heard in a court of law. It is not simply rubbish. It is an insult. To this court. To you.

And I finish this mercifully short address by making just two final comments. We say they are decisive. If, as the Defendant has suggested, he was prepared to shoot dead two men with a nine millimetre pistol, in cold blood, what does that tell you about the lengths to which he is prepared to go to for his own ends? Does it, ultimately, even if your credulity can be stretched to the extent that the Defendant has attempted to stretch it, help him? Or does the fact that he was prepared to murder two men convict him of the murder with which he stands charged before you?

And we finish with this question. Why has not one word of this story been repeated by the one person who could corroborate this? Curt, who might have been able to help you, has conveniently vanished. What a shame for this Defendant. Kira also has vanished and now has an imagined new identity. But there is one person who has not vanished. She indeed has been in this courtroom all along. The Defendant’s sister, Blessing. Why have you not heard from her? After all, it seems, at long last, she now speaks. But not to you, ladies and gentlemen. Not to you.

Luncheon adjournment: 13:05

41

14:10

DEFENDANT:

He is basically right innit. Everything he says is basically true. I ain’t got no proof of nothing. He says that Ki don’t exist. I got no proof to show you that she does exist. And MI5 ain’t dumb enough to leave any records of her visit to the prison. If I had known that he was going to say them things then maybe I could have brought some evidences about her. I could have brought you pictures but you know what, if I had brought them, he would have said, ‘How do we know that isn’t just some next girl you took a picture of?’ If I brought in her birth certificate even, he could have said, ‘Yeah that is just someone called that name. How do we know you know her even?’ This could go on and on. At the end of the day some things though, you got to take on trust. Some things I take on trust too.