The luncheon adjournment, as it’s formally called, is between 1 p.m. and 2.05 p.m. at the Old Bailey. No courts sit between those times, juries suspend their deliberations and many judges join their colleagues at the long table in the dining hall for the judges’ lunch. No verdicts are taken during this almost sacred time. The court clock is stopped.
As soon as a jury walk out of the door and are sequestered in their room, no one can help trying to predict when they will return, what a quick verdict might signify or what days of waiting might mean. It’s all completely pointless. But we do it anyway.
The preparations for verdict day had been in train for weeks. A nervous but cautiously optimistic Jeff Riley had provided a briefing to the print media; the families had their statements prepared and were ready and waiting. The scientists, who had lived with the case for years, dropped what they were doing and jumped on London-bound trains.
Fifty minutes into their discussions, the jury would have stopped, picking them back up again after lunch. When, at 3.05 p.m., the call came over the tannoy ‘All parties in the case of Bishop to Court Sixteen please,’ many had their hearts in their mouths. This really was it. There is no such thing as ‘triple jeopardy’. If the words uttered were ‘Not guilty’, the families, robbed of justice, would go to their graves deprived of the one thing they craved.
I had been to countless trials over the years, questioned many verdicts, but every fibre of my being knew, on the evidence presented, Bishop was guilty. A second acquittal would be a travesty of justice but that was now in just twelve pairs of hands.
Over lunch, Jeff Riley had briefed Michelle, Susan, Barrie and all the others who had so much riding on this moment. This would be a final closure that would never bring back their beautiful girls, but would at least help them to move forward with their lives. He told them what the judge would repeat; that they must remain as dignified as they had been throughout, whatever the verdict. Nervously they took their seats in the well of the court, some of them for the first time as, due to their numbers, they had previously been confined to the public gallery.