December 5, 2001 (Wednesday) from sportinglife.com
Judge summing up in footballers case
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Woodgate arrives at Hull Crown Court (Allsport) |
The judge in the Leeds United footballers' trial told the jury on Wednesday to treat all the defendants "without fear or favour".
Mr Justice Henriques said in his summing-up of the case of soccer stars Jonathan Woodgate, Lee Bowyer and two other men on assault charges at Hull Crown Court that they were all entitled to be treated as equal in the eyes of the law.
"Of course this case is of great importance, both to the defendants and to the community," he said.
"Allow none of that to prevent an analytical, cool-headed, impartial approach to these facts."
"All are equal in the eyes of the law, be they footballers, welders or bricklayers."
The judge began his summing-up in the eighth week of the trial in which England defender Woodgate, 21, former under-21 international Bowyer, 24, and Paul Clifford, a welder, and Neale Caveney, a bricklayer, both 22, are accused of causing grievous bodily harm to young Asian student Sarfraz Najeib in a street attack in Leeds city centre in January last year.
They all plead not guilty and also deny affray following a confrontation outside a nightclub before the attack.
The judge told the seven women and five men on the jury that there was no suggestion the attack on Mr Najeib and his brother Shahzad was motivated by racial hatred.
He said: "There is not a word of evidence to that effect."
He said the prosecution case was that the attack was a beating to punish Mr Najeib for "having had the brass neck" to punch a drunken friend of Woodgate, James Hewison, during the confrontation.
The judge said: "The defence case is that in respect of each defendant he was not involved. Not a scrap of evidence suggests this was a racially motivated attack."
He told the jury: "You will approach this case without fear or favour."
The judge warned the jurors to treat evidence of identification - on which the case against certain of the accused depended to some extent - with caution.
He said: "There have been wrongful convictions in the past as a result of such mistakes."
He said Woodgate and Bowyer had both been identified by one witness on a videotape identification parade after he had seen photographs of them in the Press.
"The consequence of this was that both defendants were deprived of a protection given to the general public - namely to stand on an identity parade with eight others without the identifying witness having seen a photograph of the suspect," he said.
"Once a witness has seen a photograph any subsequent act of identification is just as likely to be of the photograph as it is to be of the individual observed at the scene.
"Therefore do not hold it against Jonathan Woodgate or Lee Bowyer that they declined upon legal advice to attend an identity parade of the conventional type."
He said any witness would have been bound to havebeen looking for the person in the photograph he had seen.
The evidence was however admissible "otherwise celebrities would be immune from identification in certain circumstances".
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