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The Jury Files · No. 4The Empty Witness Box
Central Criminal Court, Sydney · 16 to 18 September 1935
The Crown's only eyewitness was shot the night before he was due to give evidence. You are on the jury.
The case against Arnold James Keesing.
Arnold James Keesing, lessee of the Neptune Sea Baths and Aquarium at Coogee, is on trial for the murder of his partner Leonard Vosper, found drowned in his own ocean pool on the morning a six hundred pound loan was about to cost Keesing the baths.
On the morning the trial opens, the newspapers carry one more fact. The Crown's only eyewitness, the night watchman Thomas Brennock, was shot dead in the baths the evening before he was due to give evidence. The jury never hears from him. It hears everything else.
The case is original fiction: the people and the crime are invented, and no real person is portrayed. The court, the year and the law are taken from the period, and the case says so openly wherever it departs from them.
The people at the heart of it.
The questions put to you.
Verdicts open to you: Guilty or not guilty, and it must be unanimous. Nobody tells you the answer before you give yours. The truth plays after the verdict, whichever verdict it is.
The one charge on the indictment
Whether Arnold Keesing murdered Leonard Vosper. That is the only question the jury is asked.
What a dead man's words are worth
The watchman's typed statement is admitted for one limited purpose, and the judge directs the jury carefully on what it may and may not be used for.
Murder or not guilty
The judge explains why he does not leave manslaughter to the jury, and the Crown must still prove the state of mind.
The law of the court, in plain English
- By 1935 an accused in New South Wales could give sworn evidence, make an unsworn statement from the dock, or say nothing. Arnold Keesing makes a statement from the dock.
- The verdict must be unanimous. There is no majority verdict and no "not proven".
- A New South Wales jury of 1935 was twelve men. Players of any gender take any juror card.
Solo, or the whole room.
The trial is the same either way: the same witnesses, the same exhibits, the same summing up. Only who argues with you in the jury room changes.
One juror: you. The other eleven are AI jurors who argue, point to exhibits and can be persuaded, or not.
Tell me when it launchesSix to twelve people in the room, each with a juror card. The host is the foreperson: holds the remote, reads the judge's directions if the sound is off, and calls the votes.
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