Killer Mitchell in court for Jodi murder appeal

Published on Tuesday 10 October 2006 11:52

TEENAGE killer Luke Mitchell was in court today to begin his fight for freedom.

The 17-year-old was found guilty last year of murdering his girlfriend Jodi Jones on a secluded woodland path in Dalkeith in June 2003.

He was jailed for life for what the trial judge described as a "truly evil murder".

Jodi's throat was slashed up to 20 times, her hands tied behind her back and her body mutilated.

At the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh this morning, Mitchell listened stony-faced as his legal team - led by Donald Findlay QC - presented his grounds for appeal. The hearing is scheduled to last for two days.

This morning Mr Findlay said Mitchell did not receive a fair trial because of the media coverage in the run-up to last year's case.

He said: "This was an extremely high-profile case. It attracted prior to the trial huge amounts of publicity, this was in no respect an ordinary criminal trial.

"The police inquiry went on for a number of months in the course of which there was an inordinate amount of coverage much of which was hostile to Luke Mitchell, all but accusing him of being the killer.

"Certainly by the time that Luke Mitchell was arrested and charged and ultimately prosecuted there had been huge media coverage and a very real sense created that when he was charged they were prosecuting the right person.

"Given that there was this huge background of adverse publicity everything should have been done to ensure there was a fair trial.

"My submission is that everything that could have been done was not done to ensure a fair trial."

Mr Findlay went on to say that the trial should have been held outwith Edinburgh in Glasgow, Dunfermline, Perth or somewhere else in Scotland.

He said the "intense" media coverage meant that the Edinburgh jury would already have known about the case.

Mitchell was jailed for life in January 2005 for killing his then 14-year-old girlfriend in June 2003.

However, lawyers working for Mitchell, who is now 17, began the appeal process more than a year ago and he won the right to appeal in March.

Mitchell is already Scotland's most expensive criminal and has cost taxpayers nearly 500,000 in legal aid fees.

The appeal means those costs will rise again.

Mitchell's team hopes that even if the appeal fails, they may be able to get the 20-year sentence reduced.

Lord Derek Nimmo Smith, who presided over the case, described the murder as one of the worst cases he had dealt with.

But Mitchell's legal team vowed to mount a challenge to the conviction just days after he was sentenced.

Following last January's trial, Lord Nimmo Smith ordered that Mitchell serve a minimum of 20 years.

The trial lasted 42 days - the longest single-accused murder trial in Scottish legal history - but it took the jury just six hours to find Mitchell guilty.

The Lothian and Borders Police investigation that preceded the court case involved 3150 statements from 2237 people, and 2243 items were collected as possible productions in the case.

The final report to the procurator fiscal consisted of 26 volumes and around 7200 pages.