'Millionaire' case: Jury retires
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LONDON, England -- Jurors in the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? "coded coughing" trial in London retired to consider their verdict Wednesday after the judge advised them not to be "over critical and over analytical" when considering the evidence.
Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC told the eight women and four men trying British army major Charles Ingram for allegedly cheating his way to the £1 million ($1.6m) top prize that they should not forget the officer, whether guilty or not, would have experienced a range of emotions during the "high stakes" game show.
"It is plainly right to look hard at what was said to you and you should be prepared to do so in order to decide who was telling the truth," he told them on the 19th day of the trial at London's Southwark Crown Court.
"Do not be over critical and over analytical. This was, after all, a game show although the stakes proved to be very high."
The judge, who also told jurors the only verdict he could accept from them at this stage were unanimous ones, then added: "Whether he was guilty or not guilty, he must have been going through a variety of emotions, and who would not be?"
Prosecutors claimed Ingram would never have reached the jackpot on the ITV quiz if college lecturer Tecwen Whittock had not used a series of coughs to guide him to many of the right answers.
They allege Whittock used a total of 19 strategic coughs to let the Royal Engineers officer know which of the four possible answers was the correct one.
Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, told the court the major's nursery nurse wife, Diana, helped "set up" the scam.
She and her Royal Engineer husband, both 39, of High Street, Easterton, Wiltshire, and Whittock, 53, who lives at Heol-y-Gors, Whitchurch, Cardiff, and is head of business studies at Pontypridd College, south Wales, each deny one count of "procuring a valuable security by deception" on September 10, 2001.
For their part, the officer and his wife have both insisted he won the £1 million honestly, while the lecturer has told the court his coughs were genuine and random and had nothing to do with the officer's answers.
Professor Alan Morris told the court that Tecwen Whittock suffers from hayfever, a dust allergy and asthma, giving him a "convincing" explanation for his coughing during filming of the UK version of the quiz.
