Birmingham is a ‘super diverse’ city. Should our juries reflect that?
Birmingham is a ‘super diverse’ city. Should our juries reflect that?
Dea-John Reid’s case raises the question
Dear readers — the weekend is here and The Dispatch team owes you a bit of an explanation. Last week’s second mid-week read has had to be delayed due to reasons beyond our control. We are sorry about that and hope to get an additional story published in the coming weeks.
Today’s story is a subject I know a lot of people will feel strongly about. In 2021, 14-year-old Dea-John Reid was stabbed to death in Kingstanding in what police said was a racially motivated attack. A year later, his killer was found guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter by a jury that contained no black people, raising the question of whether the jury system requires reform to ensure greater racial diversity in similar cases. In the US, there is much more scope to examine potential impropriety on juries than in the UK. I spoke to the researchers who are trying to change that.
But before that, some recommendations for things to do this weekend.
Things to do
Saturday
🧱Made in Birmingham tour: Discover key objects created in Birmingham and learn about their importance to the city of 1000 trades and the people who made them at the Think Tank Science Museum. The tour starts at 3pm and you can wait in the Signal Box Cafe from 2.30pm. Admission £5.
♻Walsall: The Home of Climate Action. This Saturday, Walsall will have not one, but two environment and sustainability fairs: The first, in Ryecroft Community Hub from 12-3pm, offers free energy advice, family activities, live music and food and features the launch of the Walsall Energy Action Project. The second, in Caldmore Community Garden 12-4pm, local groups are offering energy efficiency advice, composting workshops, eco friendly arts and crafts, games and environmental storytelling.
Sunday
💎Art Deco walking tour of the Jewellery Quarter. Discover the stunning art deco architecture of the Jewellery Quarter. This circular walking tour starts and finishes at the JQ station on Vyse Street and leisurely covers one and a half miles. Tickets cost £15.
Birmingham is a ‘super diverse’ city. Should our juries reflect that?
By Kate Knowles
In 2022, when Dea-John Reid’s mother spoke about the murder of her 14-year-old son one year prior, she chose her analogy carefully. “He was hunted by a lynch mob, reminiscent of a scene from Mississippi Burning,” she said. The film, set in civil rights era America, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in the Deep South. In Dea-John’s case, the teenager had been racially abused, called a “black bastard” and chased by a group of white men and teenage boys. He was asthmatic and when he slowed to catch his breath, he was set upon by one of the boys with a kitchen knife. Dea-John died at the scene.
However, one key difference between Mississippi Burning and the story of Dea-John was the fate of the accused. In the film, most of the perpetrators are convicted. In the trial for Dea-John’s killing, five people had been charged with racially aggravated murder and one person with assisting an offender. All but one walked free.
Three years have passed since Dea-John was killed, but his case remains controversial. This is largely because the jury for the trial consisted of 11 white people and one British-Asian person. Shortly after the trial ended, Dea-John’s mother Joan Morris claimed she had not received justice and she believed that the jury should have been more racially diverse. "I didn't get a fair trial. This is murder. This is not manslaughter,” she told the BBC. Alongside supporters, she set up the Justice 4 Dea-John Reid (J4JDR) campaign to fight for jury reform. That fight is ongoing.
It was shortly after 7.30pm on 31 May 2021 when Dea-John was killed. He was playing football with some friends when a car containing two adult men and three teenage boys pulled up nearby. The group got out and began their chase that ended with Dea-John panting next to a car parked by Costcutter on College Road, Kingstanding. CCTV footage of the moments immediately before the stabbing caught the young killer in broad daylight. He was wearing a hood, a balaclava and gloves. Moments later, he plunged the knife into Dea-John’s chest.
The police thought they had an open and shut case. Within 24 hours they had collected more than 800 witness statements, analysed more than 1,000 hours of video footage and charged the perpetrator with racially aggravated murder. By the time of the trial, the prosecution was convinced there was substantial evidence to convict all five for murder: George Khan, 39, Michael Shields, 36, and three teenagers aged 15 and 16. Under UK law, a doctrine called Joint Enterprise allows for more than one person to be found guilty of a crime, if the court agrees that the group expected the person who committed it was likely to do so.
The case rested on CCTV and doorbell footage that showed an earlier altercation between the killer and the two other teen defendants, and Dea-John’s group of friends. The court heard that one member of Dea-John’s group had attempted to rob an Armani ‘man pouch’ bag from one of the defendants. Dea-John’s group then chased the three teens, who split up, with one entering a newsagents and leaving through the back door because the group was waiting outside the front. The defendants reconvened at a house where one of them phoned Khan. Some also picked up weapons including a kitchen knife and a wheel brace.
Khan, who was in The Digby Pub on Chester Road with Michael Shields, collected the three boys in his car and drove them to look for Dea-John and his friends. When they spotted them they got out and began their chase. In court, a police officer replayed the audio of a doorbell camera on College Road. An older man can be heard shouting “f**k him up” to the boys ahead of him. The boy with the knife admitted to the killing but said he did it in self-defence. Defending, Tim Clarke QC argued it was “an action that has to be seen in the context of what happened before”.
However, to Richard Wormald QC, prosecuting, the action was clearly premeditated. He told the court that the boy left the scene and “selected a large kitchen knife to take with him”, disguising himself and putting on gloves as he was driven to College Road by Khan in his car with the other suspects. Wormald contested that the stabbing took place after an orchestrated chase, with Dea-John unarmed and backing away. He added: “It was a forceful lunge to the victim's heart.”
The verdict, for the boy who delivered the killer blow, was manslaughter. The judge sentenced him to six-and-a-half years. The rest of the defendants walked free. Standing in court in white shirts and black ties, George Khan and Michael Shields listened as the not-guilty verdict was announced. They both wiped away tears of relief.
Morris, however, was distraught. “My heart has been broken forever,” she said. To her, this was a racial issue, pure and simple. “I didn't get a fair trial. This is murder. This is not manslaughter,” she told the BBC later. “If it was Dea-John who did this to that child, Dea-John would get sentenced and charged for murder because he is black. He would have gone down for murder.” Making matters somehow even worse, Morris believed, was the makeup of the jury; 11 white people, one British Asian, no one black.
In July 2022, hundreds took to the streets to demand justice for Dea-John. Bishop Desmond Jaddoo, a familiar face at civil rights protests in Birmingham, was among their number. Jaddoo, who last year received an MBE for services to the Windrush Generation, is also a spokesperson for the Justice for Dea-John Reid (J4JDR) campaign that launched after the verdict. The group has expanded since, adding two University of Birmingham academics (a lawyer and a cultural studies professor) to its ranks.
Jaddoo is clear about the campaign’s demands: “We want to bring back jury challenges where race is an issue,” he tells me. He is aware the subject is controversial — “people will say ‘why should we give black people any leeway?’” — but argues that a jury should reflect the demographics of the area. 49% of Birmingham’s population is white, he says, so why should a Birmingham jury be 92% white? And in a case where the suspects have been charged with racially aggravated murder, at that.
Another problem, he says, is that legislation that exists to prevent information from leaking out of the jury room and prejudicing a trial also prevents whistleblowing by jurors. Hypothetically, if jurors were being racist during their deliberations there is no mechanism for anyone present to alert this to the judge. This actually happened at Birmingham Crown Court in 1995 during the trial of an Asian man accused of fraud. During the trial, a juror passed a note to the judge that said at least two other jurors were making racist remarks and jokes, and: “I fear they are going to convict the defendants not on the evidence but because they are Asian.” The judge refused to discharge the jury because of the expense. In 2000, a court in Strasbourg found the defendent’s right to be tried by an impartial tribunal had been violated.
What’s more, there are barriers that prevent more black people being on juries in the first place. A Crown court jury consists of 12 people, aged between 18 and 75, selected randomly from electoral rolls for the local districts and summoned to appear for jury service. As Jaddoo points out, 25% of the UK’s Black and minority ethnic communities are not registered to vote and are therefore eliminated from the selection process.
However, the country’s leading jury expert, University College London’s Dr Cheryl Thomas, doesn’t think there is cause for concern. In 2010, she published her findings from the most in-depth study of the subject conducted in England, stating definitively that juries were fair and effective. In a statement at the time, she said this should “lay to rest any lingering concerns” that juries should be racially balanced to ensure fairness. Her work has seemingly been used against Dea-John’s mom. When the BBC asked the Ministry of Justice for comment on Dea-John’s case in 2022, they said: “Successive academic studies have shown [juries] deliver fair and impartial results, regardless of their ethnic make-up or the ethnicity of the defendant.” The two J4DJR academics take issue with the tone of finality used here.
Dr Tara Quinlan, associate professor in Law at the University of Birmingham, found out about the J4JDR campaign from a member of her local morning running group, Dr Katharina Karcher. An associate professor in German at the same uni, Karcher’s work focuses on protest movements, and she had been regularly attending the campaign meetings and vigils for Dea-John. With a bit of pilot funding from the uni, the two set out to conduct some research from two different angles, emphasising their distinct interest areas: legal and cultural.
Quinlan, who is American and trained in New York, tells me that in the U.S. there is a huge body of case law that allows for examination of impropriety on juries. In the UK, the scope is much narrower. There is also very little research in the UK on juries, jury diversity and what happens in the jury room, and only one scholar has been granted access to a jury room for her research — you guessed it, Dr Cheryl Thomas.
Thomas’s methodology in her work involved staging mock trials — experiments to recreate the conditions of a court room as a way to scientifically assess whether a different arrangement would have a different result. Karcher explains that that’s really complicated because you need to have exactly the same case each time with a different variable. It’s very expensive, and often relies on the recruitment of students which is not realistic. Karcher and Quinlan, want to expand the available data by focusing their research on victims with lived experience of racism.
The cultural side of Quinlan and Karcher’s work is concerned with stereotypes and other, more subtle forms of discrimination that might build up or intersect, including gender, race, age and social demographics. Karcher explains that they are asking questions about who is and isn’t considered a worthy victim, and what kinds of people do juries tend to empathise with. Some scholars in the UK like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have shown how stereotypes suggesting black people have a propensity to commit crime have been created and then advanced by the authorities and the media.
A lot of research also came out of the aftermath of the 1993 Stephen Lawrence case, during which the Metropolitan Police were accused by the Lawrence family of treating their son like a suspect rather than a victim because he was black. In Dea-John’s case, the campaigners haven’t found fault with the police, but are concerned with the public’s potential to perceive the victim as a perpetrator. Quinlan says: “To me the cases are very similar and I don’t draw that distinction in any meaningful way.”
Still, there is a dearth of this type of research in the UK when compared with the other side of the Atlantic. “That’s a huge problem, part of our research aim is to get the data out there,” says Quinlan. In Dea-John’s case, they think the focus on the altercation prior to his killing, coupled with the knowledge that groups of black boys are more likely than white boys to be perceived as a gang instead of a group of friends playing, could have contributed to the jury seeing the boy as violent rather than as a victim. “Even within such a diverse city as Brum, people, including black and anti-racist campaigners, approached me with different opinions on this case, assuming he was stabbed with his own knife,” says Karcher.
So far, they have conducted a representative survey of 1,000 people about juries and civic participation that suggests they could be right. 21% think ethnic minorities are more likely to engage in crime, while 30% neither agree nor disagree with this point, meaning that 51% don’t “actively disagree”.
This is just the beginning of their research — they need to secure funding for a full academic study — but the tragic story of Dea-John’s killing has at least raised questions about the makeup of juries. In a city like Birmingham, where minority ethnic people make up the majority of the population, that question is especially pertinent.
On 31 May, at a vigil on College Road, after attendees said prayers and held lit candles aloft, Bishop Desmond Jaddoo addressed the crowd. He said it’s important to remember Dea-John’s name and honour his memory, “but we have to try and change the system which let him down.”
I spent four years as a Crown Court usher in Birmingham dealing with a huge number of jurors that certainly reflected the City’s diversity. The choice of a jury for a given trial is entirely random. I was always impressed by the seriousness with which jurors approached the difficult task of hearing the evidence and reaching a verdict.
Good work Kate. But the sinister runs deeper. The increasing reliance on huge data sets to influence or make critical decisions- including those in criminal justice - and AI algorithms to interpret them use data that is innately biased and struggles with ethnic minority group application. I would hope we turn away from that. I would hope diverse juries were part of the human answer. Justice is not blind; but it can so easily be dangerously skewed by what we think we know and what we think we perceive.