Jurors dismiss £2m drugs trial and take defendants out for a drink
A spokesman for Purcell Parker said: ‘‘It was so incredibly long, there was so much evidence, there were about 15-20 hard disks each containing between two or three thousand 30-second videos each. The jury had to sit through hundreds of hours of people going in and out of a house.
“The prosecution made a big deal of it but on closer inspection it was just a large number of people going into a house. It’s absolutely not usual for a case to go on this long.”
Jurors at Oxford Crown Court quickly dismissed the case after ten months of evidence came to an end.
After the verdict was announced the jury sent a note inviting the defendants and the Purcell Parker lawyers for a celebration drink at the local pub in Oxford. More than 60 people went to the Heads of the River pub, including jurors, defendants, relatives, lawyers, ushers and custodial officers.
The defendants are considering starting proceedings for malicious prosecution.
The spokesman added: “It was amazing, there became almost a strange camaraderie between the defendants and the jury. The trial originally scheduled to last for five months ended up dragging on for ten.
“These jurors’ lives had been put on hold so they developed sympathy for the defendants. This amount of time and public money just to get an acquittal is outrageous.”
