Senior Reporter
derek.achong@guardian.co.tt
An Arima man, who murdered his 14-year-old stepdaughter after she disobeyed his instruction not to leave the family’s home, has lost his appeal over his conviction.
On Wednesday, Appellate Judges Alice Yorke-Soo Hon, Gregory Smith, and Vasheist Kokaram dismissed Timothy Pierre’s appeal.
Pierre was accused of murdering Stacey Gibbs.
According to the summary of facts in the case, on June 17, 2005, Gibbs’ mother Coreen left her and her two younger siblings at home with Pierre as she went to visit their grandmother in Valencia.
Pierre left the children home briefly as he went to the grocery.
During that time, a neighbour came to the locked gate to the family’s property and told Gibbs and her siblings that their mother was calling them.
The children jumped the gate and joined the neighbour.
When he returned home, Pierre found the children playing outside. He scolded them and sent them to their beds.
Later that evening, Gibbs’ younger brother Ryan was awoken by a scream. He peeped through an opening in the roof from the top bunk of his double-decker bed and saw Pierre beating his sister with a length of wood before choking her until she went unconscious.
Pierre wrapped Gibbs in a plastic sheet and carried her out of the gate beyond Ryan’s sight.
When he was arrested by police a week later, Pierre took homicide detectives to the cesspit near the family’s home where he had dumped Gibbs’ body.
Forensic pathologist Dr Eslyn McDonald-Burris performed an autopsy on Gibbs’ body but could not conclusively determine the cause of death as it (the body) was in an advanced stage of decomposition.
However, she did not rule out blunt force trauma or strangulation.
During his trial before High Court Judge David Harris in 2016, the 12-member jury that eventually convicted Pierre heard evidence from psychiatrist Dr Hazel Othello, who examined him.
While she admitted that he had low intelligence and a slightly subnormal mental state, she suggested that he could be held responsible for his actions and was fit to stand trial.
In his defence, Pierre’s defence attorneys claimed that he was provoked by Gibbs while he was disciplining her. They also contended that his confessions to the police were unfairly obtained.
In the appeal, Pierre’s lawyer Keith Scotland presented five grounds in which he felt that Justice Harris mishandled the case in summing it up to the jury that eventually convicted his client.
Scotland claimed that Justice Harris did not properly present Pierre’s defences to the jury and failed to ask them to consider the defence of diminished responsibility based on Dr Othello’s evidence.
All five grounds were rejected by the appeal panel as they declined to fault Justice Harris’ handling of the case.
Former Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Nigel Pilgrim represented the State.
