Judge Valerie Pearlman at Southwark Crown Court, south London, used a £2,500 satellite video link to create the nearest thing to a "virtual" courtroom ever seen in Britain.

The BBC's Andrew Lebentz: "The move saved the taxpayer an estimated £2.5m"

Via the link, the 62-year-old judge followed the trial's progress, answered questions from the deliberating jury, and dealt with various legal matters from her hospital bed 60 miles away.

The "unprecedented departure" from courtroom tradition salvaged a six-month, £6m fraud trial, and is estimated to have saved the taxpayer more than £2.5m in retrial costs.

'Way out of a hole'

The move began last March when Judge Pearlman broke her leg in a fall, and the trial was delayed for six weeks.

Jury was first ferried to St Bart's hospital

It then resumed, but the fracture failed to heal, and earlier this month she was again admitted to St Bartholomew's Hospital, in central London.

However, with her summing up 75% complete, Judge Pearlman said she was deeply worried about the effects of a retrial on the defendants and the public purse.

"I wondered if there was any way out of this hole and what could be done to save the trial," she said.

The jurors were first ferried to St Bart's to hear her summing up from a wheelchair, and then returned to Southwark to spend nearly weeks considering their verdicts.

During that time, Judge Pearlman was transferred for an operation to a hospital near Worthing, West Sussex, where the court set up the video link for the trial to be concluded.

Via the connection the jurors could see Judge Pearlman - on a couple of occasions wearing a pink and purple patterned dress - sitting on the end of a slightly rumpled bed with her left leg in bandages. The top of a pair of crutches could occasionally be glimpsed.

Southwark's senior judge, George Bathurst-Norman, kept a procedural eye on the unusual sittings, while Judge Pearlman gave a string of on-screen rulings and directions.

No more 'dark ages'

Judge Bathurst-Norman banned reporting about the "novel" move until after the trial, to avoid the jury being put under pressure in a situation "unprecedented in English legal history."

After the trial he told the jury: "You are probably the only jury ever anywhere in the world to receive part of the judge's summing up from hospital and you are certainly the first jury in this country to receive directions from the judge over a video link."

He added that he hoped the innovation would lay to rest the widespread belief that courts "live in the dark ages".

Gian Lombardi, 50, and his wife, Veronica, 28, both of Bayswater, west London, and Gianfranco Udovicich, 50, from Bloomsbury, central London, were all found guilty of one count of conspiracy to defraud between January 1994 and September 1996. A fourth defendant was acquitted.

The three people convicted will be sentenced when Judge Pearlman has recovered sufficiently to be brought to court in a wheelchair.