Derek Achong
The Court of Appeal has reserved its decision in an appeal from an Arima man convicted of murdering his 14-year-old stepdaughter after she disobeyed his instruction not to leave the family’s home.
Appellate Judges Alice Yorke-Soo Hon, Gregory Smith and Vasheist Kokaram said they needed time to consider Timothy Pierre’s appeal after hearing submissions from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and his attorneys during a hearing yesterday.
Pierre was accused of murdering Stacey Gibbs.
According to the summary 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, who admitted he had lied.
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 awakened 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 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 him, heard evidence from psychiatrist Dr Hazel Othello, who examined Pierre.
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.
Presenting submissions before the appeal panel yesterday, 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.
The latter ground did not appear to meet the approval of the appeal panel based on its analysis of the evidence.
Justice Smith said: “You can’t start to talk about diminished responsibility unless you have this evidence. There is no evidence from which you can raise it.”
In his submissions, Assistant DPP Nigel Pilgrim rejected all the grounds raised as he suggested that Justice Harris’ handling of the case could not be faulted.
Dealing specifically with diminished responsibility defence, Pilgrim noted that Pierre only raised provocation at the trial.
“He did not give evidence and led no expert medical evidence himself to establish his abnormality of mind and the only evidence as to his state of mind at the time of the killing was that of the State’s witness Dr Othello,” Pilgrim said.
