Nigel tried to call his sister and her fianc?lan Farthing, to no avail. Then he saw the newsflash.Since the media tumult immediately after his sister’s death, Mr Dando, who joined BBC Bristol in January, has managed to keep himself out of the spotlight, speaking to the media only to publicise the appeal fund for a crime research centre in Jill Dando’s memory. By Chris GrayThe JudgeMr Justice Gage comes from distinguished legal stock and is well used to presiding over high-profile murder cases.Sir William Marcus Gage, 63, followed his circuit judge father, Connolly Hugh Gage, into the legal profession. Educated at Repton and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he was a lieutenant in the Irish Guards during his national service and was called to the Bar in 1963.

He has been a High Court judge since 1993 and was presiding judge in the south-eastern circuit from 1997 to last year.During that time he sat at Lewes Crown Court to hear the case against Sion Jenkins, the former deputy headmaster, who was jailed for life in 1998 for the murder of his teenage foster daughter Billie-Jo.Throughout the intense media focus on the Dando case, the judge urged jurors to keep “cool heads”. By Cahal MilmoThe QCAs the eyes of the media fell on the Old Bailey on 4 May for the first day of the Jill Dando trial, Orlando Pownall QC began to present the evidence that would convict her killer.The 48-year-old barrister had to convey both the emotions behind the presenter’s killing and the cold logic of the web of circumstantial evidence on which his case rested.Standing in Number One Court, he said Barry George would be proved to have murdered Ms Dando by a “jigsaw” of evidence that led “irresistibly” to guilt. For Mr Pownall, the leading senior Treasury counsel, the Dando case was the biggest of a career that began when he was called to the Bar in 1975.He had previously appeared for the Crown in police corruption cases, Yardie trials and as a junior counsel in a number of IRA prosecutions He is married with three children.. Michael Mansfield QC has made his name by overturning convictions against all the odds. His client list, which includes the Guildford Four, five of the Birmingham Six, the Tottenham Three, and Judith Ward, reads like a who’s who of wrongful convictions throughout the past 25 years.But the Barry George case will present him with one of his greatest challenges to date.Mr Mansfield is a professional and will not have been caught off-guard. Even when the case was going well he will have been preparing for the possibility of a guilty verdict. On Saturday when the jurors were once again sent back to their hotel it must have been clear to him that there was a real danger the case could be decided against his client.He might have even thought to re-examine his own courtroom performance – even though to the outside world it had once again appeared to be another faultless display of advocacy.

Trial observers at the Old Bailey were impressed with the relaxed and skilful manner in which he presented complicated points of law in a way a jury would most easily understand them.Throughout the trial he chose his phrases carefully, always with one eye on the watching media. It was the prosecution barrister, Orlando Pownall QC, who remarked after seeing a copy of Mr Mansfield’s defence speech, that he could predict the newspaper headlines the following morning.How right he was as nearly all of the papers followed Mr Mansfield’s introductory statement to the court: “The case against this defendant is hanging by the merest of threads.”Some have accused Mr Mansfield of picking his cases and that the George trial, with its apparently leaky prosecution, was more evidence of this.But that is not a criticism that holds water. Mr Mansfield has had his fair share of courtroom disappointments. The private prosecution of the men accused of murdering the black teenager Stephen Lawrence was thrown out for lack of evidence at the Old Bailey in April 1996. He went on to act for the Lawrence family at the inquest in February 1997, and finally spent 69 days on their behalf at the public inquiry where his observations helped shape Sir William Macpherson’s final recommendations.Mr Mansfield, a railway worker’s son from Finchley, north London, is a passionate supporter of left-wing causes as well as a tireless campaigner in the UK’s civil rights movement.

But most of all he knows his reputation was built on fighting for individuals who believe they have been wronged.Michael Mansfield is renowned as a colourful character, a bestselling author, as well as an expert in civil rights law. If he worked in the United States, his public profile would probably be on a par with that of O J Simpson’s flamboyant lawyer, Johnny Cochran.His early reputation was as a defender of the indefensible, His big break came in 1972 when he defended one of the alleged leaders of the Angry Brigade, an English anarchist group that bombed several ministers’ homes.. Perhaps it is no surprise that a crime that seemed utterly inexplicable and completely unbelievable should turn out to have been perpetrated by a man whose guilt also seems inexplicable and unbelievable. Perhaps it is no surprise that a crime that seemed utterly inexplicable and completely unbelievable should turn out to have been perpetrated by a man whose guilt also seems inexplicable and unbelievable.Only one thing seems certain. The guilty verdict delivered against Barry George, now sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of Jill Dando, was not the verdict that was widely expected.Nor is it a verdict that draws a line under this investigation as cleanly as might be hoped, based as it is on the most tenuous of forensic evidence, alongside circumstantial evidence that does not appear utterly convincing.Long before the trial began, local and criminal gossip suggested that the police had got the wrong man.