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S U M M I N G - U P

MR. JUSTICE MCCOMBE: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The time has now arrived for me to sum up this case, and I thank you first of all for your very careful attention both to the evidence and to Counsels' arguments. I have watched your concentration with admiration, and I am grateful for it. I am sure you are probably anxious to get down to the task of considering your verdicts. There is another voice you are going to have to listen to, and it may be I am afraid probably for at least a day and maybe a little into tomorrow.

It is my task now to give you directions as to how you will go about your job during the course of tomorrow, and first of all I have got to direct you on certain matters that are probably very well known to you already from your general knowledge or experience of life, but please listen carefully to what I have to say, even though some of it may be obvious, and the first matter on which I have to direct you concerns our respective roles as judge and jury in this trial. I am sure you appreciate that our functions in the trial have been and remain quite different. Throughout our close working relationship in the last few weeks, it has been my task to look after the law and procedure in the case, and now I have to give you directions on the law as it applies to the case that you have to consider. When I do that, you must accept those directions and follow them. I am also required to remind you of the prominent features of the evidence as they occur to me. However, it is your task and your responsibility to judge that evidence and decide all the relevant facts. When you come to consider your verdict, you and you alone do that. Do not look to me for an answer or a hint of an answer as to what your verdict should be, there will not be one.

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