Cairns trial adjourned to Monday

THE fate of Chris Cairns will remain in the balance over the weekend after the jury in his perjury trial at Southwark Crown Court were unable to reach a majority verdict before the week’s proceedings were adjourned at 4.30pm on Friday. Cairns, who could face a maximum of seven years in prison if found guilty, must now wait until tomorrow at the earliest to learn his fate, with more than eight hours of deliberation from the jury having yet to produce an outcome.
The defendants, Cairns and Andrew Fitch-Holland, whose charge of perverting the course can only be considered once the principal perjury charge has been resolved, were called back into the dock at 11.44am, but only so that the jury could request that the original requirement of a unanimous verdict be reassessed.
Mr Justice Sweeney, the judge, granted the jury permission to return verdicts on which at least 10 of the 12 members agreed after consultation with Sasha Wass QC, the crown prosecutor, and Orlando Pownall QC and Jonathan Laidlaw QC, the respective defence counsels for Cairns and Fitch-Holland.
The perjury charge relates to Cairns’ successful 2012 libel action against Lalit Modi at the High Court in London, which arose as a result of a tweet sent by Modi in 2010 accusing Cairns of match-fixing during the now defunct Indian Cricket League.
In the course of the libel trial, Cairns stated that he had “never” cheated at cricket, and would never contemplate doing so, a statement that attracted the interests of the Crown Prosecution Service in the wake of leaked testimony given by his former team-mates, Lou Vincent and Brendon McCullum, to the ICC’s anti-corruption and security unit (ACSU).
Of the nine witnesses called to give evidence on that count, Mr Justice Sweeney stated that the evidence of two of the three “key” witnesses – Vincent, McCullum and Eleanor Riley, Vincent’s ex-wife – needed to be accepted as true in order for the perjury charge to be upheld.
However, he advised caution over the testimony of the first of the witnesses, Vincent, who has already been banned from cricket after admitting to accepting money to under-perform.
Although the judge stressed that the jury was under no time pressure to reach a verdict, the prospect of a retrial cannot be ruled out if there is no progress next week.

(ESPN Cricinfo)

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