A crown court case collapsed after a woman "simply followed the crowd" and accidentally joined the jury.

The woman went into the courtroom and joined the jurors - despite not being picked to sit on the trial.

Judge Jonathan Seely said at Chelmsford Crown Court that he had never seen anything like it in his 30 years of handling cases.

Prosecuting barrister Lori Tucker had just concluded her opening address to a jury of seven men and five women.

But there was a problem - one of the women should not have been there.

She had been sitting outside in the pool of people summoned for jury service, from which panels are drawn.

She blindly followed a group into the courtroom and joined them on the jury bench.

Without any of the staff noticing, she unwittingly took the place of a missing male juror who had already been sworn into the hear the case, but wasn't there.

Because she had not been properly chosen from the pool and sworn in, it meant that had the case gone ahead, it would have been a mis-trial and any convictions would have had to be cancelled.

After the juror realised her mistake and alerted the judge, the other jurors were sent out and she was called back alone into the courtroom.