Jury’s verdict delivers justice in Lundy retrial

With the jury’s guilty verdict on Wednesday, the case against Mark Edward Lundy for the murder of his wife and seven-year-old daughter may be considered conclusively over. This was a circumstantial case. That means it was one built by the collective weight of evidence – opportunity to commit the offence, a motive for doing so, scientific findings, the absence of any other even remotely plausible suspect and so on. No single item may be compelling by itself but taken together they add up to be an incontrovertible case. Which is what the jury unanimously found.

Because it is a circumstantial case it may be possible to find some flaw in any particular item. But in the absence of a succession of serious flaws or something dramatically new that outweighed everything else, the outcome would be unaffected.

The murders were particularly brutal. Christine Lundy was attacked as she lay on her bed, hacked to death with some sort of small axe, her face and skull smashed with a succession of blows. Her daughter Amber was attacked as she fled presumably after coming upon the scene. The savagery of the attack was such that when the case went to the Court of Appeal after Lundy’s first trial, the court increased his sentence so that he would serve at least 20 years in prison. Lundy will now return to prison to serve the eight years he has remaining before qualifying for parole. Since he still insists on his innocence and shows no remorse, suggesting he has no insight into the monstrousness of what he has done, he may well serve longer.

The scenario the prosecution painted in the second trial was different in several details from the first trial. Most strikingly, the time at which the murder was alleged to have occurred was put several hours later.

It is not unusual in retrials for changes of evidence to occur. The appeal process can often point up flaws in a case and fresh eyes reassessing the evidence can form a new picture of precisely what occurred. With the passage of time one element of the case may have been strengthened by better science. This was the DNA evidence which said that a blood spot on Lundy’s shirt was a fragment of central nervous system tissue from his wife.

From the time spent on it, that was plainly the evidence the prosecution thought most important and it may well have been the evidence that most weighed with jury. Unless the jury were to accept that it had got there by accidental contamination when the shirt was in police custody, there was no other explanation for it other than that Lundy was the killer.

The quashing of Lundy’s conviction by the Privy Council came after it quashed the murder conviction of David Bain. Since then the conviction of Teina Pora for rape and murder has also been quashed. Critics have suggested that this indicates that the criminal justice system is defective. It is hard to see that is the case.

All of those cases were difficult. In the Bain case a retrial was held and Bain was acquitted, but that decision was controversial. Pora will not be retried but the Crown continues to say there was strong evidence that would have justified a retrial.

It was regrettable that it took more than a decade for Lundy to get his retrial. That was partly because of the time it took to assemble new evidence. It was also partly because he was declined legal aid and had to find a barrister in London willing to work for a minimal fee. Despite the delay, ultimately the system worked. Although Lundy’s sister continues to support him, his brother was scathing in his condemnation of him. The consensus from those who observed the seven-week trial seems to be that with the verdict justice has been done.