Mr Justice Hilliard formally discharged the jury on Friday, noting his deep disappointment at the panel's complete inability to view the defendants with the legally required level of hostility.
LEEDS, England — The rain fell in a relentless, gray drizzle against the brutalist concrete of Leeds Crown Court on Friday morning. Inside Courtroom 3, the air smelled faintly of damp wool, instant coffee, and institutional floor wax as Mr Justice Hilliard quietly surrendered to the inevitable.
The trial of two prisoners accused of murdering the disgraced former Lostprophets singer and convicted child abuser Ian Watkins has been formally abandoned. Hilliard discharged the jury for unspecified legal reasons, ending a week-long struggle to maintain the necessary illusions of the British justice system.
“Very reluctantly, I’m going to discharge you and the case will have to be retried,” Hilliard told the twelve men and women, who had spent the better part of the week nodding encouragingly at the defense bench and passing approving notes to one another.
The procedural collapse underscores the profound logistical difficulty of prosecuting the murder of a man whose death was widely regarded by the British public as a net positive for the local environment. Court clerks spent much of Thursday politely intercepting baked goods and congratulatory greeting cards that jurors had attempted to smuggle into the glass-walled dock.
The prosecution had initially attempted to power through the proceedings, presenting grim forensic evidence of the prison attack to a jury box that responded with quiet murmurs of approval. The breaking point reportedly came on Friday when a juror asked the presiding judge if it would be a conflict of interest to start a crowdfunding campaign for the accused men's commissary accounts.
The integrity of the Crown demands that we at least pretend this is a tragedy, and it has become apparent that nobody in this room possesses the requisite theatrical training.
A new trial will be scheduled for late autumn. In the interim, authorities are carefully screening a fresh pool of potential jurors, searching the West Yorkshire electoral register for a dozen citizens who have been living completely off the grid since 2012.