The Court of Appeal yesterday ordered a retrial for three brothers from Chaguanas accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
The ruling in favour of Anand and Mohan Singh and their paraplegic brother, Ravi Singh, all of Todd's Road, Chaguanas, came almost one year after they were convicted of assaulting the child on several occasions between August and December 2005.
In allowing the siblings appeal, appellate judges – Justice Paula Mae Weekes, Alice Yorke-Soo Hon and Mark Mohammed – ruled they were prejudiced in their trial. They held that the brothers should have been tried separately because their alleged crimes were committed separately on different occasions.
"Every accused must be afforded a fair trial and not just one that someone thinks is fair," Weekes, who delivered the oral judgement at the Hall of Justice, Port-of-Spain, said.
The judges also suggested that by being jointly tried, if the jury believed the evidence against one of them, they were likely to draw undesirable inferences with regard to the others.
While Weekes did not discount the intelligence of jurors and their capability of properly taking instructions she said there was still a strong possibility that the brothers may have been prejudiced based on the circumstances under which the trial was heard.
As part of its judgment the court released the three brothers, who have spent the past year in prison, on $75,000 bail.
A date for their retrial is expected to be set at the start of the 2015/2016 law term in September.
At the end of the trial before Justice Althea Alexis-Wind�sor in the Port-of-Spain High Court last June, Mohan and Anand were both handed ten-year sentences for having sex with the minor on two occasions.
Mohan was slapped with an additional eight-year sentence for grievous sexual assault. Ravi, also known as "Piggy", was sentenced to ten years in prison for raping the child and eight years for grievous sexual assault on her.
Ravi, a former truck driver and a tassa instructor, is wheelchair-bound. He was paralysed after falling from a tree several years after the alleged crime. His brothers are construction workers.
The sexual assaults allegedly took place when the victim was in Form One. The brothers were charged with assaulting the girl on different days during that period.
It was alleged they did not take part in the assaults together but all occurred at the child's home in central Trinidad when her parents and four younger siblings were out. The brothers were arrested on January 1, 2006 after the girl reported the incident to her father.
The siblings were represented by Daniel Khan and Karunaa Bisramsingh, while Trevor Ward, QC, appeared for the State.