Jury begins deliberating

Justice Lasry: The moment has arrived

ACCUSED Geelong killer Karl Hague is now waiting for a jury to decide if he is guilty of murdering Ricky Balcombe at the Market Square shopping centre in 1995.

At 3.25pm yesterday Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry told the jury of eight men and four women “the moment has arrived” to begin their deliberations.

They will be kept together until their unanimous verdict is reached.

Their job is to determine if it is beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Hague was the person who stabbed the Newcomb teenager to death in the shopping centre at 3.20pm on May 5, 1995.

Justice Lasry said the identity of the killer was the central question of the six-and-half week trial, thus the jury did not need to consider the other elements of the murder charge, such as the state of mind of the accused killer, his intent or whether he acted in self defence.

The judge took three-anda-half hours to summarise key evidence and considerations to jurors yesterday, and told them it was unlikely they’d ever perform a more important civic duty.

He urged them to do their job without “bias, prejudice or sympathy”.

The trial started March 1 when Mr Hague, 44, of Bell Post Hill, pleaded not guilty to murder.

While many people in the shopping centre saw the attack almost 23 years ago, Justice Lasry noted the victim’s friend Paul Bellia was the only one who claimed to know who the culprit was.

But he said the jury needed to exercise caution in assessing Mr Bellia’s evidence identifying Mr Hague as the killer, and should take into account the trauma he admitted it caused him, the passage of time and how subsequent reporting of the crime might have affected his recollections.

He noted Mr Hague denied he was in central Geelong at the time, and that Mr Bellia had, in the past, given various conflicting accounts of what he saw.

Mr Bellia was an important but “flawed” witness, according to Crown prosecutor Andrew Tinney, SC.

Justice Lasry told the jury there were no time limits as it considered that case. “You will take the time you need to take to reach a verdict,” he said.