The Trial: A Murder in the Family, which concluded on Thursday, was billed as an unprecedented insight into the British justice system. But over the course of five consecutive nights on Channel 4, it emerged as something even more extraordinary and complex, revealing an honest and frequently harrowing picture of attitudes towards domestic violence.
Director Nick Holt made the outstanding documentary The Murder Trial in 2013, which followed a real case of a man on trial for murdering his wife through the Scottish High Court, right down to the verdict. But he wanted to go even further, and show how a jury comes to a decision. Alongside co-director Kath Mattock, a case was invented, with remarkable attention to authenticity, and put through the judicial process, with a real judge, real barristers, real court staff, and 12 jurors treating it as if the man accused of murdering his wife had really been accused of the crime.
The man was Simon Davis, a university lecturer on trial for strangling his estranged wife Carla. Over four nights, jurors and viewers heard evidence that portrayed him as a volatile man. His ex-wife explained that she had ended the marriage because he slapped her. Carla’s sister and best friend both recalled him losing his temper and grabbing Carla’s mouth hard enough to leave a mark. A neighbour remembered him acting strangely around the time Carla must have been killed. The defence’s case centred on raising the possibility that Carla’s current boyfriend Lewis could not account for his whereabouts around the same time. Was there enough evidence to know, without reasonable doubt, that Davis was the culprit?
It was enough to destabilise the prosecution’s case, in the end, and we were left with a hung jury. Though there had been many dramatic twists, the real shock came in the aftermath, when it was revealed how each juror voted. Their deliberations were edited to look like a close call, but in the end it was not: four women found him guilty, while eight people, including every man on the jury, found him not guilty. The jurors were to find out what really happened at the same time as the viewers, and on Thursday all was revealed: Davis was guilty as charged, having lost his temper when Carla tried to leave him for good, strangling her – thankfully, off-camera – as he screamed at her to ask if this was what she wanted. He was calm enough to go to the toilet before he called an ambulance.
This was a case that centred on domestic violence, and what it revealed about the jurors’ preconceptions and interpretations of events, both men and women, was fascinating and difficult to watch. Ex-military man Simon appeared certain from very early on that there was not enough evidence to convict Davis. When Simon talked about his life, he explained that he had been through similar experiences – his own wife had an affair and became pregnant with another man’s child. Barber James mentioned that he had been the victim of an abusive partner. Every time the word “sexism” came up, it was from one of them, and they both felt as if men were on the receiving end of it. (Refuge explains the disproportionate effects of domestic violence on women here.) It seemed important to watch that conversation unfold; it seemed to me to reveal a degree of rare honesty, no matter how unpalatable.
We heard a different story from some – and crucially, not all – of the women. Martha, the quietly reasonable health worker who was convinced of Simon’s guilt, told of a co-worker murdered by her husband, a man thought of as a pillar of the community. Office manager Cherry talked about being abused as a child. Natalie seemed genuinely distraught at what she perceived as the jury’s failure to convict Davis.
According to Women’s Aid, an estimated 28.3% of women have experienced domestic abuse; because of the complexities of measuring its scale and frequency, they suggest that it is vastly underreported. While The Trial revealed a gripping picture of how a criminal trial works, it was also a vital document of how people understand and interpret violence against women. The lack of a verdict was shocking, and rightly so – it showed how hard it was for the jurors to conceive of Davis as a killer, despite all the evidence from many different people that he had been violent to women before.
In the final minutes, it turned into a different programme, as if revealing its true identity, with one final, haunting reminder: on average, two women are murdered by their partners or ex-partners in England and Wales every week.
