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| Pair convicted of Devlin murder | Pair convicted of Devlin murder |
| (10 minutes later) | |
| Two Belfast men have been found guilty of murdering teenager Thomas Devlin in the north of the city in August 2005. | Two Belfast men have been found guilty of murdering teenager Thomas Devlin in the north of the city in August 2005. |
| Nigel Brown, 26, of Whitewell Road and Gary Taylor, 23, from Mountcollyer Avenue had denied killing Thomas who was stabbed on the Somerton Road. | Nigel Brown, 26, of Whitewell Road and Gary Taylor, 23, from Mountcollyer Avenue had denied killing Thomas who was stabbed on the Somerton Road. |
| A jury of eight men and four women took one hour 25 minutes to reach their unanimous verdict. | A jury of eight men and four women took one hour 25 minutes to reach their unanimous verdict. |
| Brown had already pleaded guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm to Thomas' friend Jonathan McKee. | Brown had already pleaded guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm to Thomas' friend Jonathan McKee. |
| The jury accepted the prosecution case that Brown and Taylor had acted as "a team" when they attacked Thomas and two friends during which Thomas was fatally stabbed nine times. | |
| In turn the jury rejected defence arguments that the prosecution case against Brown was simply a "jigsaw puzzle cut up with scissors" while against Taylor it amounted to nothing more than a "fairytale - grim fairytales". | |
| During their five week trial, the court heard that Brown confessed to his stepfather that he'd been involved in an argument with the three teenage friends and saw Taylor stab the schoolboy "in a frenzy". | |
| But Brown also claimed that when they both left their then homes in Ross House in the loyalist Mount Vernon flats complex to walk a dog, he had no idea that Taylor had armed himself with a knife. | |
| However a prosecution lawyer maintained that their intentions that night were "crystal clear", to find "soft targets" after going out together "tooled up". | |
| The lawyer had also claimed that Brown's admission to being at the scene was little more than "a damage limitation exercise", whilst Taylor's supposed alibi of being elsewhere smoking cannabis with friends had "melted away like the snow." |