LONDON // William Nash, the lawyer for Philip Spence, denied his client had “murderous intention” when he bludgeoned the three sisters in a “totally unplanned” attack.
Spence had a hammer hidden in his jacket when he entered the Cumberland Hotel early on April 6.
“It is not disputed that Mr Spence had it on his person.
“ The question you may wonder is initially why was it there?” Mr Nash told the jurors.
“You have heard Mr Spence tell you that he had recently been attacked and badly injured by people who believed him to be indebted to them for drugs – something that you may feel is certainly plausible.
“Drug dealers, you may think, are not necessarily the gentlest of companions, and even if Mr Spence is six foot three it doesn’t give him immunity from attack.”
Spence, said Mr Nash, was known as a “hotel creeper”, meaning he entered hotel premises “in an attempt to do something without detection”.
“He cannot have known that on any of those floors there would be a suite which had a door that was visibly slightly open.
“He simply cannot have known that would be the case. There is no evidence to suggest that other than perhaps bashing the door down with the hammer in his possession that he had any ability to open a door in the hotel if it was locked.
“Whatever did happen that night you may think was something which had a horrible sequence of coincidences attached to it, and the main one was that there was a suite with an open door. You may think that assists you in determining that little issue of intent.”
Mr Nash said it was “implausible in the extreme” to think Spence could have known there would be “such an easy entrance”. “It therefore follows that events of that night must be considered to be pretty well totally unplanned and unanticipated,” he said.
“Clearly, as he has said to you in evidence, his purpose in crossing the threshold was for the purpose of theft, and at that stage all the occupants of the room were asleep and he has told you the build-up to what he saw.
“He saw some items through the door, goes in farther and the next thing he notices is some iPads.
“He is going in there. Clearly his intention you may think at that point was to go in and get out, and to get out without alerting the occupants of the room of his presence. It is a tragic fact that he failed in that endeavour.
“As he failed in that endeavour you have heard that he resorted to the use of that hammer and the terrible use of that hammer.
“Was his intention at that point to kill? Well, members of the jury, you can think to yourself what profit would it be to him to kill them?
“What would be the point?
“He may be behaving extremely selfishly in saying that what he was trying to do was to buy himself time, in effect to get away.
“He has told you that his intention was to silence them to give himself the opportunity to make his escape.”
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