Sycamore Gap prosecutor shares his story of the trial

The trial of the two men who felled the Sycamore Gap tree garnered global attention. What was it like for the prosecutor at the heart of the case?

It felt like a murder trial.

Day after day we heard of phones and cars being tracked, gloating messages swapped by the culprits in the aftermath and emotional statements about the devastation they had caused.

Only in this case, the weapon was a chainsaw and the victim was a tree.

Richard Wright KC has worked on more than 100 murder cases in his 27 years as a barrister.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, the prosecutor says the interest in the trial of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers was on a scale he had never encountered before.

“It was the public expectation,” he says.

“The evidence was overwhelming so, in cases like that, if you don’t get a conviction, something’s gone badly wrong.”

The jury retired on a Thursday, spending four and a half hours out in discussions before being sent home for the day, eventually returning with guilty verdicts the following morning.

“I was climbing the walls,” Mr Wright says of the wait.

“You start thinking ‘Oh my God, could I have done it differently, what if I’ve got it wrong?'”

He didn’t – the jury agreed the evidence was overwhelming.

During his opening speech, the video of the tree being cut down was shown for the first time.

When the two-and-a-half minute long clip, filmed on Graham’s phone, finished you could have heard a pin drop in Newcastle Crown Court’s courtroom one.

“Some people might say it was ‘just a tree’, but the senseless nature of it was quite emotional,” Mr Wright recalls.

“It did have a greater power when it was presented in court than I thought it would.

“Everybody was stunned in to silence.

“I felt the same.”

The video wasn’t the only piece of evidence that helped convict Graham, 39, and Carruthers, 32, who had travelled from their homes in Cumbria to fell the tree on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland in the early hours of 28 September 2023.

As news of the tree’s felling rapidly spread, Graham and Carruthers were sending each other screenshots of news reports and outraged social media responses to what they had done.

“I couldn’t believe they had recorded the video in the first place,” Mr Wright says.

“Equally, I thought their conversations the next day were significant, which frankly only the people who’d cut down the tree could be having.”

They described it as their “operation”, talked about how good the cut had been and were getting palpable excitement from the fury.

“It was one of those cases where you had your absolute dream tick list of every single thing you’d want to prove a criminal offence,” Mr Wright says.

“Admissions after the fact, evidence of them actually committing the crime, cell site and other circumstantial evidence.

“The police did an excellent job.”

During the trial, Mr Wright described the pair as “the odd couple”, best friends before falling out spectacularly as the public revulsion at their actions became clear to them.

“They were certainly unconventional,” Mr Wright says.

“I thought the relationship between them was very strange, they’d had an intense friendship and now they were absolutely daggers drawn.”

In court, there were also heated exchanges between Mr Wright and Graham.

During cross examination, the defendant raised his voice to the prosecutor and said “I’ve had enough of you calling me a liar. You’re trying to wind us up.”

Was that what Mr Wright was trying to do?

“I thought to myself he was trying to make the jury think I was bullying him and being unfair,” Mr Wright responds, adding: “I’ve had worse.”

The question of “why” has been the big one for this case, what was the motive for what Mr Wright described to jurors as a “moronic mission”.

After being convicted, Carruthers went from denying any involvement to admitting being a part of it and attributing it to “drunken stupidity”.

Jailing them for four years and three months each, Mrs Justice Lambert gave that claim short shrift.

They had done too good a job for it to have been done while drunk, the judge said, adding “sheer bravado” and “thrill-seeking” were driving factors.

Mr Wright has another theory, relating to the pair taking away the wedge of tree they had cut out and Carruthers having a newborn baby.

“I really do think the motive was to get some sort of trophy to celebrate the birth of Carruthers’ child,” the prosecutor says.

“I think it was probably something as pathetic as that.”

Does he think the wedge, which was photographed later that night in the boot of Graham’s Range Rover, will ever be found?

“I doubt it,” Mr Wright says. “I think they would have got rid of it.”

Since the sentencing, the barrister has already been on two murder cases and spent time sitting as a judge, but he is very aware his name is still attached to the Sycamore Gap case.

“It’s certainly a case I will never forget,” Mr Wright says.

“As a barrister you like to be anonymous. You go and you do your job, you don’t really want to be in the public eye so I was quite pleased when it was over.”

As he moves on to his next cases, the men he prosecuted have been beginning their prison terms.

What did he think of the sentence?

“As far as I could tell, 50% of the public think it was too long and 50% think it was too short,” Mr Wright says.

“So that tells me it’s about right.”