- Thursday, June 27, 2024
A judge at London’s Old Bailey court discharged a jury because it was unable to reach a verdict after more than 70 hours of deliberation
By: Shajil Kumar
A woman from an aristocratic family is to face a re-trial with her partner for manslaughter after their newborn daughter died while they were living off-grid in freezing temperatures.
Constance Marten, 36, and her partner Mark Gordon, 49, were arrested after a seven-week police hunt in January and February last year during which they spent time living in a tent.
A judge at London’s Old Bailey court last week discharged a jury because it was unable to reach a verdict after more than 70 hours of deliberation.
Prosecutor Tom Little on Wednesday told the court that the Crown Prosecution Service would seek a retrial. Judge Mark Lucraft fixed a date for March 3 next year.
He also lifted reporting restrictions that the jury had found Marten and Gordon guilty of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice.
Marten and Gordon, who have denied all the charges against them, went on the run in January 2023 after police found a placenta in their burnt-out car by a motorway outside Manchester in northwest England.
Marten had told the court they absconded because they wanted to keep their daughter Victoria, after her other four children were taken into care.
The couple was eventually arrested nearly two months later, in Brighton on England’s southern coast.
Days later, Victoria’s badly decomposed body was found in a shopping bag on a vegetable patch.
But taking the witness stand Marten, whose family has historic ties to the royal family, insisted she and Gordon were loving parents.
“Mark and I love our kids more than anything in the world,” she told the court. “I did nothing but show her love.”
The couple, of no fixed address, have also faced charges of child cruelty and causing or allowing the death of a child which they denied.
Marten had told police Victoria died when she fell asleep in the tent while holding her under her jacket. (AFP)
