Soham jury must ‘put aside emotion’

THE jurors in the Soham murder case must “put aside emotion” as they hear about the deaths of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, they were told yesterday at the Old Bailey in London.

Trial judge Mr Justice Moses said his courtroom was not the place for feelings, or for understandable sympathy, for the girls or their families.

He urged the 12 jurors to consider the prosecution’s case against defendants Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr coolly and calmly, “uninfluenced by emotion, uninfluenced by sympathy”.

Huntley and Carr listened silently from the dock as the seven women and five men who will decide their fates were sworn in.

Beside the dock the parents of the two schoolgirls watched as the formal process of the trial began.

Lawyers for the prosecution will set out their case against the former school caretaker and his ex-girlfriend today.

But the jury listened as clerk of the court Hannah Worsley read out the five charges on the indictment against the pair. Huntley, 29, denies the double child murder in August last year but has pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Carr, 26, a former classroom assistant at the girls’ primary school, denies one charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and two charges of assisting an offender. They were not asked to enter pleas again yesterday.

The clerk told the jurors: “To this indictment they have pleaded not guilty and it is your charge to say, having heard the evidence, whether they are guilty or not guilty.”