The jury in the trial of two former friends accused of chopping down the Sycamore Gap tree has been sent out to start deliberations.
Groundworker Daniel Graham, 39, and mechanic Adam Carruthers, 32, deny two counts each of causing criminal damage to the tree, which stood beside Hadrian’s Wall until it was felled in September 2023.
Sending jurors out to consider their verdicts just after 11.50am on Thursday, the judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, said they were under no pressure of time.
She told them: “It takes as long as it takes.”
The judge added: “The only verdict which I can accept from you is a unanimous verdict for both defendants, on both counts.”
The prosecution say that the men drove for 40 minutes from the Carlisle area during Storm Agnes and cut down the tree in the pitch black, with one of them filming the destruction on a phone.
The prosecution told Newcastle Crown Court that they took a wedge from the tree as a trophy which has never been recovered.
The tree also damaged the Roman wall when it crashed down on to it.
In his closing speech to the jury on Wednesday, Richard Wright KC, prosecuting, said felling the tree had caused sadness and anger up and down the country, while the two defendants “must have thought that this was going to be a bit of a laugh”.
But, Mr Wright said, they soon realised that the public reaction was one of outrage “and that far from being the big men they thought they were, everyone else thought that they were rather pathetic”.
He added: “Owning up to this arboreal equivalent of mindless thuggery would make them public enemy number one. And neither of them has got the courage to do that.”
Mrs Justice Lambert, in her legal directions, said both defendants deny any involvement in the criminal damage.
Carruthers, she said, claimed he was staying at home in his caravan with his partner and their newborn baby.
Graham claimed he was at his home that night and while he accepted that his Range Rover was driven to the car park nearest to Sycamore Gap and his phone was used to film the tree being felled, he said his co-accused took both.
In his closing speech, Chris Knox, for Graham, said the defendants had fallen out “spectacularly”.
He said Graham was accused of being “stroppy” when answering the prosecution’s questions.
“Does that make him the Sycamore Gap tree murderer?” Mr Knox asked the jury.
“Or does it mean exactly what he said in his interviews with the police – he has been dropped in this?”
Andrew Gurney, defending Carruthers, said Graham had “named Adam Carruthers because he needs a scapegoat”.
He said Carruthers was in the dock “not because he was found at the scene… but because of Daniel Graham’s mobile phone and the words of one man – Daniel Graham, who having found himself in the dock, has reached desperately for a lifeline and tried to throw Adam Carruthers under the bus to save his own skin”.
Mr Gurney said: “Adam Carruthers was not creeping about a national park in the dead of night.
“He was at home with his partner.”
The jury was later sent home to resume deliberations at 10am on Friday.
