A jury found a 22-year-old not guilty of glassing a reveller in the face during a brawl at The Beach bar.

John Arthur Cook, 22, of Tranquility Lane, St. George?s, was found not guilty of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm (GBH) to Neil Carroll on February 19, 2005.

?I?m glad its off my chest, you know,? Cook said after leaving Supreme Court with his family. ?It?s been a lot of stress.?

Mr. Carroll, a quantity surveyor who has been in Bermuda seven years, required plastic surgery and over 100 stitches to his face but did not comment when informed of the verdict yesterday.

Crown counsel Wayne Caines said he would not appeal the jury?s majority verdict ? nine jurors found Cook innocent and three thought him guilty.

In Supreme Court on Monday, defence witness Maxwell Curtis said Cook approached him at the bar at The Beach and told him an unseen group of three to four white men wanted to attack him.

?I turned back to the bar and heard a scuffle behind me,? Mr. Curtis said. ?I turned around and Cook was on the floor being pulverised pretty much by a group of white guys. John?s brother came over punching and pushing the guys off his brother. John came to his feet and started swinging and punching.?

He also said Cook was ?full hot,? or drunk.

But Mr. Caines accused Mr. Curtis of making up his story to help a friend in trouble.

Under cross-examination by Mr. Caines, Mr. Curtis admitted to leaving after the bar-brawl without giving a statement to Police or Beach security.

Defence lawyer Craig Attridge told a six-woman, six-man jury they should acquit Cook because of a lack of evidence.

?Clearly Mr. Carroll is a victim,? Mr. Attridge said. ?The injuries he suffered were very severe. But the issue for you is not if he was a victim, but if he was a victim of Mr. Cook.?

He said his client faced a maximum sentence of ten-years for at worst, punching Mr. Carroll in self-defence.

?Sometimes the attacker comes off worse than the person who inflicts the injury,? he said. ?Our law does not punish someone for reasonably protecting themselves.?

Additionally, no one saw a glass in Cook?s hand, not even Mr. Carroll?s friend Greg Reid, who only saw a ?Portuguese?looking man? punch Mr. Carroll.

?There is no bloody shirt in the evidence before you. There is no bloody anything in the evidence today,? he said. ?There might be more to the incident than Mr. Carroll would like you to believe.?

However, Mr. Caines said the prosecution had proved its case every step of the way.

?Don?t be bamboozled by my friend?s silk tongue,? he said.

The prosecutor said there was no problem about identification, as Beach bouncer Ameer Shakir testified on Tuesday that he saw Cook punch Mr. Carroll twice on the night in question.

And Cook did not appear ?pulverised? in a Police mug-shot, as Mr. Curtis claimed.

?The only evidence of who hit the complainant is that man!? Mr. Caines said. ?Hold him responsible for what he did.?

In his summation, Puisne Judge Carlisle Greaves told the jury to expel all matters of race and nationality from their minds during their deliberations ? which lasted over two hours.

?The prosecution is relying on circumstantial evidence,? Mr. Justice Greaves said. ?Nobody saw him punch the complainant with a glass.?

In addition, even if they believed Cook wounded Mr. Carroll, it was up to the prosecution to prove Cook did not act in self-defence.

But he warned self-defence would only be legal if Cook used a reasonable amount of force to defend himself.

?If a man gives you a cuff and you pull out a machete and chop off his hands then maybe that is an unreasonable amount of force,? he said.

Speaking on the evidence, he said it felt like everybody was drunk in this case, no one saw how the fight started and different people saw different things at different times.

It was also up to the prosecution to prove Cook was not provoked by Mr. Carroll, or was intoxicated to a point that he could not intend to cause GBH.

Mr. Attridge interrupted Mr. Justice Greaves to say he never mentioned intoxication once as a defence.

But once the jury retired Mr. Justice Greaves said it was extremely unhelpful to interrupt a judge during his crucial summation.

?You can truly adversely affect the quality of my submissions, perhaps to your advantage, or perhaps to the other side,? Mr. Justice Greaves said.?Now I have a headache.?