Rebekah Brooks prosecution compared to medieval witch-hunt
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Version 0 of 1. Parts of the proecution case against Rebekah Brooks have been run like a medieval witch-hunt, the phone-hacking trial has been told. In his final remarks in a two-day closing speech, Brooks's barrister said she had been accused of running a carefully scripted defence which, if true, would have amounted to "cynical perjury" and "serious misconduct" on his part. Jonathan Laidlaw QC said that since the Milly Dowler hacking revelations, many people "hated" Brooks and there had been "profound anger" within News International when News of the World was shut down, yet not one former colleague had come forward to say she knew about phone hacking. He described the prosecution as falling "woefully short" and urged the eight women and three men to find her not guilty. Laidlaw claimed that there had been an "unhealthy" focus on Brooks as part of the police investigation into hacking and that "one after another, baseless theories" had been "abandoned" by the prosecution and replaced with "about turns" and "twists " in their case. He said that against this backdrop, there seemed to be nothing his client could have said to have opened the mind of a prosecution that she was not guilty of the four charges against her including a conspiracy to hack phones. Laidlaw told jurors that "the defining feature of a medieval trial for witchcraft was the accused could never win" and that "the terrifying reality for a woman in the 16th century was when it came to witchcraft it was the allegation itself that killed her – once a woman was being accused of being a witch she was dead: if she drowned in the ducking stool she was dead; if she survived she was condemned as a witch and burnt at the stake." Referring to the lead counsel for the crown, Andrew Edis QC, he said "the prosecution approach has been at times has been that of a witch-hunt". "Just as in the medieval show trial you could tell a true witch when she floated, so Mr Edis will interpret every piece of evidence about Mrs Brooks, everything she says and everyone else says about her as a sign of guilt regardless of its true meaning." Laidlaw told jurors: "If she comes across as a likeable person to you in the witness box, it's only a cunning mask. "If she makes you laugh it's only because she's telling lies." "If her evidence makes sense it's only because it's carefully scripted." He said jurors had probable seen "deeper into Rebekah Brooks's private life than anyone else", and that the degree of scrutiny "may well be unprecedented in British justice". The trial continues. |