Senior Reporter
derek.achong@guardian.co.tt
A decision by the local courts to stop the prosecution of three men accused of committing a triple murder has been overturned by the country’s highest appellate court.
Delivering a judgment, yesterday morning, five Law Lords of the United Kingdom-based Privy Council ruled that a High Court Judge and two out of three judges of the Court of Appeal, including Chief Justice Ivor Archie, were wrong to allow the trio to pursue the case let alone uphold it.
Lady Sue Carr, who delivered the Board’s judgment, said, “As the authorities confirm, occasions when it is appropriate to judicially review a prosecutorial decision whether to (continue to) prosecute are extremely rare.
“In the present case, there was unwarranted interference by a civil court of concurrent jurisdiction with ongoing proceedings in a criminal court,” she added.
The legal victory for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) set an important precedent as it helped define the parameters for pursuing civil lawsuits challenging ongoing criminal prosecutions.
The outcome means that DPP Roger Gaspard, SC, has to decide whether two of the three men should be rearrested and tried for the crime as one died while their case was still pending.
The case, which led to the appeal, was brought by Chris Durham, Ian Sandy, and Deon Calliste.
Durham, Sandy and Calliste were charged with murdering 15-year-old Mubarak Calder, Mentie Murai, 19, and Kevon St Louis during a shooting at a bottle factory at Factory Road in Diego Martin on April 21, 2009.
The State’s main witness against the trio was O’Neil Benjamin, who claimed to have witnessed the murders and implicated them.
However, when the trio’s trial was about to commence in 2019, Benjamin admitted to prosecutors that he lied about the trio’s involvement during the preliminary inquiry of the case and indicated that he was willing to repeat the fabricated evidence.
The trio filed the civil lawsuit after DPP Gaspard refused to discontinue the case against them based on the admission.
In June 2019, High Court Judge Avason Quinlan-Williams upheld their novel lawsuit as she ruled that the DPP’s failure to discontinue the charges was unreasonable, improper and unfair.
The trio was freed following the outcome. While waiting for the Appeal Court to weigh in on the case, Durham slipped and fell into a river in Diego Martin while searching for his missing pet parrot in October 2020.
In January 2022, the Appeal Court delivered a majority ruling in which CJ Archie and Appellate Judge Peter Rajkumar agreed with Justice Quinlan-Williams’ findings.
Justice Nolan Bereaux delivered a dissenting judgment in which he claimed his colleagues were “palpably” wrong in intervening in the case.
Lady Carr and her colleagues ruled that Justice Bereaux was correct in his analysis.
They ruled that the trio should have only been allowed to pursue the judicial review case if they did not have any other form of redress in relation to Benjamin’s admission.
They pointed out that they could have sought a stay of the proceedings from the judge assigned to preside over their trial.
The Board also concluded that even if they did not have the alternative remedy, Gaspard’s decision to allow the trial to proceed, despite Benjamin’s contrary claims, could not be faulted.
“The short answer to this is simply that the DPP was under no obligation to provide any reasons for his prosecutorial decision,” Lady Carr said.
She pointed out that any perceived unreasonableness and unfairness were not enough to amount to an exceptional circumstance to warrant the decisions of the local courts.
The trio was represented by Richard Clayton, KC, Gerald Ramdeen, Wayne Sturge, and Dayadai Harripaul. The DPP’s Office was represented by Ian Benjamin, SC, Keston McQuilkin, and Pierre Rudder.