My Day in Court. A Visit to London's Old Bailey

I dropped in on a murder trial in England's most famous courthouse.

If you want to observe a trial at London’s Criminal Court Building, as I did, you have to line up — queue up, as they say in England — in a bleak, tiled passageway, just down the street from the regular entrance which is reserved for those with official business inside - judges, attorneys (barristers), courthouse employees.

The courthouse is better known as the Old Bailey because of its location at the top of Old Bailey Street. The original building opened in 1907 and is an impressively ornate structure with a huge dome atop which is a golden statue of Justice as a woman holding scales. The public entrance, however, is in the newer building, a startlingly bland appendage built in the 1970s. Halfway down the passageway is a large wooden door with a glass case next to it that bears a positing with a long list of what you are not allowed to bring inside. It includes what you’d expect. No cell phones, cameras or weapons. But there are also some odd prohibitions. No Afro picks, cannabis grinders, matches, sweets, or chewing gum allowed.

 

In line behind me, a short middle-aged woman chatted amiably with a wiry young man in his 20s who wore a heavy jacket and a serious expression on his face. The young man, who spoke with a thick Arabic accent, was trying to convince the woman that she couldn’t bring in her cell phone.

“But what do I do with my phone?” She seemed quite alarmed at the prospect of being separated from it.

The man told her there was a travel agency nearby where she could check it for a small fee. She lingered for a while but left. I asked the man what trial he was following. He told me it was the case of a 10-year-old girl who'd been beaten to death by her father, step-mother and uncle. He said the three defendants had turned against each other, accusing one another of being responsible.

“The girl had a broken bone in her neck for months,” he said. “Can you imagine the pain she was in?”

I didn't want to think too long about that. Instead I asked, "“Have you been going to that trial?”

“Yes," he said. "Three days last week." Then he answered what would have been my next question. “I want to see how the system works.”

From my time as a reporter in New York City, I had learned about and seen people, usually retirees, who are regular spectators at criminal trials. In a sense, it’s a kind of entertainment except it was real. Still, if your notion of what a criminal trial is like is based solely on Perry Mason or Matlock or Law & Order, you may be disappointed. A criminal trial can be plodding and mired in what can seem like arcane details. Unlike TV or the movies, the defendant won’t be dramatically exonerated by a brilliant defense lawyer, or break down and admit guilt after a withering cross examination by the prosecutor. That just doesn’t happen in real life.

After a half hour wait, people started entering through the wooden door. It was slow going as only one person at a time could be admitted and then summoned by a man in a uniform who manned a security checkpoint at the top of a steep staircase.

A Black woman approached and stood beside me just as I passed through the entrance. She seemed intent on going in ahead of me. I gave her a look.


“I’m family,” she said, meaning, as I took it, that she was related to someone on trial.

“Oh, okay,” I said. "Go ahead."

She looked at me. “Are you family too?”


When I said no, she looked at me as if she didn’t quite believe me, or else couldn’t understand why I would be there. I let her pass ahead of me.

Then she volunteered that the relative whose trial she was going to attend was being retried after the previous trial ended in a hung jury.

"What was the charge?" I asked.

The security officer at the top of the stairs called out, "Next."  As she turned away, I thought I heard her say, "Murder."

When it was my turn, I mounted the stairs. I emptied my pockets into a plastic tray, took off my overcoat and handed it to the security guy to examine. Then I passed through a metal detector. On the other side sat a uniformed woman wearing a powder blue medical mask. Her job was apparently to give each entrant a cursory, baleful visual inspection of each entrant.

Once I was cleared, I went up two more flights of stairs until I saw a sign, Courtrooms 5-7. I headed down the corridor toward Courtroom 5 but a court officer told me it was already full. So, I approached the door to the closest one, Courtroom 7. The court officer, who shared the same vaguely rude manner as her colleagues downstairs, reminded me that I had to stay inside at least 30 minutes. 

I went inside. I took a seat in a small gallery of three rows overlooking the courtroom. A handful of other spectators were seated, among them the young man who'd been in line behind me - he too had failed to get into Courtroom 5 - and the woman who had just earlier told me she was a family member of someone on trial.

I turned my attention to the proceedings. Someone was testifying. It was a little like opening a book you haven't read in the middle and trying to understand the story and characters. In the middle of the room, standing behind a long table, was a man wearing a loose black robe and some kind of white cravat. He was directing questions to someone in the witness box.

As I tried to decipher what exactly was happening, I noticed the wigs. The judge wore one. It was short and the color of straw. The man who was standing asking questions had one on, too. So did another man seated beside him who appeared to be a stenographer, as well as a small woman seated next to him. I would later learn she was the defense attorney.

Wigs worn by courtroom lawyers and judges came into fashion in the U.K. back in the late 1600s. The legal profession was actually a little slow to adopt the custom which, according to a BBC article, had become fashionable earlier that century in part, because of rampant baldness caused by a syphilis epidemic. Funny how some traditions are born.

photo credit: BBC

By the 1840s, the wigs - which were made of human hair or horse hair, and called "perukes" - were essentially required, the same as the black robes and white cravats. The BBC article recounted the story of a 19th century judge admonishing a barrister named Bodkin who dared to come to court without a wig. "I neither see nor hear Mr. Bodkin," the judge said.

And, while the mandatory wearing of the peruke was ended in 1995, the article said "barristers can still face disciplinary action for contempt of court and breaching the code of conduct" if they don't, which seems pretty mandatory to me.

photo credit: Highwaystarz-Photography

I quickly determined the standing man was the prosecutor and the witness was the coroner who’d performed the autopsy on the victim, whoever he was. I took in the scene. As a reporter, I’d covered at least a dozen trials and served on three juries. The scenario I was looking at bore scant resemblance to any I’d ever seen in the U.S. First, the courtroom was very small. The judge was seated on a dais about five feet above everyone else. Across the courtroom from the public gallery sat the 12 jurors in rows of six each. They were peering intently at monitors on the tables in front of them. I wondered, Where was the defendant? In the U.S., the accused sits with his lawyer at the defense table.

I looked around. The defendant was at the back of the courtroom, sitting alone on a long bench behind a low wall topped by a glass. He was a young Black man, maybe in his late 20s, with short dreadlocks. He wore a dark suit and was alternately watching the proceeding with deep interest (as you would imagine) and studying at a large book containing the same visual exhibits that the witness was discussing.

The witness, who I took to be a coroner, was going into minute detail about the width and depth of stab wounds to the victim's thigh and abdomen and slash marks on his forearm. The prosecutor spoke slowly, in a bland, officious style; nothing at all theatrical or dramatic about it, and, notably, without playing to the jury. It was as if they were bystanders. Twice, he addressed the judge about some point, calling him "M'Lord."

I looked again at the defendant. He was looking around the courtroom. He looked up at the spectator gallery. Our eyes met and his gaze lingered. Did I detect curiosity? Suspicion? I looked away. 

Violent crime is far rarer in London than it is in New York City, where I live. Although the two cities have roughly the same population, in 2023, according to the British newspaper The Daily Mail, there were 386 homicides in New York compared to 104 in London. Put another way, there were 12 murders for every 1 million people in London vs. 46 per million in New York (which was surpassed by Chicago, 220 murders per million, and Philadelphia, 250 murders per million). The availability of guns in America is surely one factor in that disparity. Murder by firearm is by far the most popular method of dispatching someone in the U.S., accounting for two-thirds of slayings. In the U K., death by knife - which, by its very nature, is a grimly personal interaction - is No. 1, making up more than 40 percent of killings.

In Salman Rushdie’s book Knife, a harrowing account of the vicious attack on him in upstate New York by a knife-wielding assailant, he writes, “A gunshot is action at a distance, but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters. Here I am, you bastard, the knife whispers to its victim.”

In the U.K., the maximum sentence for murder is life imprisonment. The death penalty was officially abolished in 1998, but the last execution was in 1964. It may be little remembered now but, in 1972, the U.S. ,the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional because it was arbitrarily applied. The prohibition lasted four years. In 1976, the court ruled that a carefully crafted capital punishment statute that addressed  the arbitrariness was permissible. Today, 27 states and the federal government allow capital punishment. Most countries in the world have abolished it.    

photo credit: Matt From London

The trial at the Old Bailey droned on until the prosecutor's questioning abruptly stopped. The judge called on the defense attorney. She said simply, "No cross examination." The judge then announced that the court would stand in recess. The jurors got up, scrambled about grabbing coats and backpacks, and quickly disappeared. No one stood as they left. Standing when the jury enters and leaves a courtroom is an American custom intended as a show of respect for the trial's ultimate arbiters. Not here. I looked for the man who was on trial. He was gone, It was as if he'd vanished.

I got up and departed the gallery. In the hallway, the court officer was talking to the young man with the Arabic accent. I paused to listen. He was in trouble because he had not remained in Courtroom 7 the requisite half-hour. He look terrified.

"You can be penalized," the officer was saying in a tone that struck me as unnecessarily harsh.  I started to intervene on the young man's behalf, then thought better of it.

Two days later, I did a Google search to see what had happened at the trial in Courtroom 5, the one everyone wanted to see. The father, stepmother and uncle accused of the brutal beating death of the little girl -her name was Sara Sharif - were on trial. The press accounts said the day after I had been at the Old Bailey, the father, under questioning by his wife's lawyer, had suddenly confessed.

Although he insisted he hadn't meant to kill his daughter, he said, "Yes. She died because of me."

No, this wasn't TV or a movie. This was real.