Convicted murderer asks court to overturn jury’s decision

Wednesday 26 May 2021

A 57-year-old man twice found guilty of murdering a woman and dumping her body at a secluded bay is asking for his conviction to be quashed.

Jamie Lee Warn, who is serving a life sentence for killing Zsuzsanna Besenyei in May 2018, is arguing that the verdict last October was unsafe because the jury should have been given the choice to convict him of manslaughter if they couldn’t agree it was murder.

The jury then was only given the option of deciding to convict or acquit on a single count of murder, as well as two counts of perverting the course of justice. 

The choice of manslaughter - which, like murder, is unlawful killing but without the intent to kill or cause serious injury - was not available to them.

Addressing the Court of Appeal this week, Advocate James Bell, for Warn, argued that manslaughter should have been offered as an alternative to the jury because  the evidence presented at trial was purely circumstantial and there had been no conclusion on how, where and when Miss Besenyei had died. 

“The jury were acting in a vacuum when only option was to convict of murder or acquit,” he said. “For unlawful act manslaughter, a lesser intent could have arisen and the jury should have known about it.”

For the Crown, objecting to the appeal, Advocate Simon Thomas argued that if the jury had been asked to consider a manslaughter charge, the lack of evidence on the cause of death would have led it to speculate.

Instead, he said, the jury had considered the evidence of Warn’s actions after her death - including the disposal of her body and giving false statements to the police - to reach their conclusion of murder. 

They were properly directed by the trial judge on what constituted murder, he said, which was sufficient for them to convict.

The case for murder had been clearly made, he said, adding that - if the Court of Appeal did quash the conviction or downgrade it to manslaughter, the Crown would apply for a retrial.

Warn’s first conviction after a trial in 2019 was overturned by the Court of Appeal later that year due to “irregularities” with the original proceedings.

This latest application to overturn Warn’s second trial conviction has already been turned down by one of the appeal judges but Warn retained the right to make his case to the full court, which he did this week. 

The Court of Appeal, which will release its decision in the coming weeks, is made up of Jonathan Crow, Lord Anderson of Ipswich and David Perry, who appeared at the Royal Jersey Showground via videolink. 

Pictured top: Warn leaving court at the time of his first trial, which found him guilty of murdering his “secret lover”, 31-year-old Zsuzsanna Besenyei, in May 2018