Black Immigrant Daily News

Tareek James, the final alleged member of the One Don faction of the Clansman gang mounting his defence at the ongoing trial, fell ill on Tuesday.

The trial, which resumed on Monday after several delays over the past two weeks, was adjourned until Monday, July 25 in the Home Circuit Court where 28 defendants are on trial for a raft of criminal offences, including murder.

The court was expected to hear evidence from a final witness, a police detective, on whether another individual had been charged with the murder of a man called ‘Outlaw’ when James took ill.

James is accused of murdering ‘Outlaw’ at the behest of the alleged leader of the One Don faction of the Clansman, Andre ‘Blackman’ Bryan. The murder took place in Spanish Town, St Catherine on November 2, 2017.

James’ attorney, Esther Reid, has been adamant that her client was not the shooter, and the police had, in fact, arrested and charged another individual with that murder.

The detective has been subpoenaed to testify

On Monday, three defendants closed their cases after defendants Kalifa Williams, who is represented by attorney Abina Morris; Pete Miller, who is represented by attorneys Gavin Stewart and Shadday Bailey; and Donovan Richards, who is represented by attorney Denise Hinson, closed theirs.

This was after the prosecution and defence attorneys agreed on records of the men’s detention in custody.

The defence attorneys had requested and subsequently received records from the Horizon Remand Centre and the Spanish Town Police Station about their clients’ respective detentions.

The attorneys are trying to use the relevant records to prove that all four defendants were in custody when the criminal acts that they are accused of committing were carried out.

James’ attorney, Esther Reid, has also agreed with prosecutors on records relative to the detention of her client.

The records, which were read into evidence, placed all four in custody at the time when some of the separate murders they were accused of participating in occurred.

In relation to James, the records showed that he was detained at the Spanish Town Police Station on November 7, 2017, days after the murder of ‘Outlaw’. He has remained in police custody to date.

This means that James had been in detention when a bus driver was murdered in Spanish Town on November 15, 2017.

Still, James’ detention would not absolve him of participating in the September 2017 arson and double murder of Jermaine Robinson and his girlfriend Cedella Walder in New Nursery or ‘Fisheries’ in Spanish Town.

The prosecution has accused James of being one of the alleged leader’s bodyguards.

For defendant Pete Miller, he was accused of participating in the murder of two men at a playground in Rivoli in Spanish Town between March 10 and 15, 2017.

But his detention records show that he was in police custody at the time of those killings.

The records revealed that he was first arrested on November 20, 2012, and held in custody at Horizon Remand Centre until his release on August 11, 2017.

He was rearrested in September 2018, and has been in custody since that time.

The 28 accused are being tried under the Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organisations Act), 2014, better known as the Anti-gang Legislation, on an indictment containing several counts.

The offences were allegedly committed between January 1, 2015, and June 30, 2019, mainly in St Catherine, with at least one murder committed in St Andrew.

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FILE PHOTO: Sean Luke’s mother, Pauline Lumfai, wipes away a tear as she speaks to media after Akeel Mitchell and Richard Chatoo were found guilty of her son’s murder on July 23, 2021. That verdict has now been quashed as the Appeal Court has ordered a retrial of the case.

ALMOST a year after they were convicted of the murder of six-year-old Sean Luke, the Court of Appeal ordered a new trial for two men because of the number of serious errors made by the judge who delivered their guilty verdicts.

The decision of Justices of Appeal Nolan Bereaux, Mark Mohammed and Maria Wilson came after prosecutors said they could not defend the appeal filed by Akeel Mitchell and Richard Chatoo.

Mitchell and Chatoo were convicted by Justice Lisa Ramsumair-Hinds on July 23, 2021. In her verdict, Ramsumair-Hinds said Luke’s killing was a planned and frenzied assault.

At their virtual trial, both men denied killing Luke.

Sean Luke

On Tuesday, deputy Director of Public Prosecutions George Busby and assistant DPP Sabrina Dougdeen-Jaglal said they were unable to deal with the challenges posed by four grounds of appeal raised by the men’s lead attorney Jagdeo Singh.

Both prosecutors said the State had to concede in the appeal and explained why, in detail, as they spent almost two hours taking the judges through the evidence and the judge’s verdict.

Bereaux, who delivered the decision, said because of the public interest in an expeditious retrial, they were ordering that the case be assigned to a judge’s docket no later than July 25.

In their ruling, the judges said they agreed this was a difficult and complex case, and were also in agreement that the judge made “material errors which have led to a serious miscarriage of justice.”

They also said they could not apply the proviso which allows the court to dismiss an appeal although a ground of challenge finds favour with the court, because of the “seriousness of these errors and the number of them.”

They have promised to give full reasons which will include guidance on issues which arose at the trial.

The appeal was the first involving a judge-only trial.

Two main grounds identified by the prosecutors dealt with complaints of the judge’s application of the legal principles on the role each played in the killing of Luke as a primary and secondary party to the crime.

The grounds related to the judge’s failure to adequately direct herself on the DNA evidence presented in the case, how she viewed the testimony of the main prosecution witness, and that she failed to give sufficient details on the principles of law and finding of facts she relied on for her verdict.

Prosecutors and the attorneys for the men said the judge misstated the prosecution’s case and invited speculation on the evidence. She was also accused of engaging in reverse directions to herself on other pertinent aspects of evidence.

In his submissions, Singh said judges should not be allowed to come to findings on speculation as it will undermine the public’s confidence in the judge-only trial system.

He said there was good reason for the public’s confidence in jury trials. In this case, he said the judge’s verdict was indefensible and to do anything but allow the appeal would promote judges giving arbitrary decisions in such trials.

In urging the judges not to dismiss the appeal, Singh further contended the judge did not say how she reconciled the inconsistencies in the prosecution’s evidence or how she dealt with the factual hurdles.

“She needed to deal with the inconsistencies and demonstrate in her reasons how she overcame these and she did not.”

Both Singh and the prosecutors said the only hurdle in ordering a retrial was that the alleged offence took place in 2006, but since the trial ended in 2021, there was no issue relating to the availability of witnesses or evidence.

Justice Lisa Ramsumair-Hinds

Because Mitchell and Chatoo were 13 and 16 at the time of the alleged offence, they could not receive the death penalty.

A minimum sentence of 17 years, six months and 13 days at the court’s pleasure was imposed on 28-year-old Mitchell, with period reviews every three years. His next review would have come up on September 13, 2024, if a retrial was not ordered.

Chatoo, 31, received a term of detention of 11 years, six months and 13 days’ at the court’s pleasure. He, too, was expected to return in three years for a sentence review by a judge. The two had opted for a judge-only trial, however, they can opt for a jury at their next trial.

Luke’s body was found on March 28, 2006, in a bushy area in the cane field close to his home at Henry Street Extension, Orange Valley, Couva, two days after he went missing. An autopsy showed he died from internal injuries arising from being sodomised with a cane stalk.

Also appearing for the two were attorneys Vashisht Seepersad, Richard Jaggasar, Vere-Marie Khan, Alyssa Seecharan, Savitri Samaroo, and public defenders Khadija Sinanan and Shane Patience.

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The push for food security in the Caribbean is kinda ironic when you think about it, ain’t it? Weren’t the Amerindians Columbus stumbled over, eating and living? We know for a fact they ate very balanced diets and didn’t complain about food security. For fruits (and vitamins) they had pineapples, mammee, sapodilla, star apples, genips, guavas, and cashews etc. They cultivated maize (corn) on a large scale with cassava, sweet potatoes and yautia etc as staples. They made cassava flour and cassava bread. For meat, they ate all sorts of small animals that were grilled, baked, or used in “pepper-pot” with cassareep the main flavour!!

But our problems came when the Europeans insisted these folks who’d co-existed for millennia with their environment were “uncivilized” and everything about them was to be discarded. Including them – who were soon wiped out. The Europeans did things “their way” – including the foods they ate. And as they brought waves of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, etc, European’s tastes became the “civilized” tastes and as such was desired by those who wanted to be “with it” and move up!!In terms food most comes from plants and in another ironic twist, our entire existence in the modern global system was because of agriculture!! We were shanghaied to pioneer this earliest of human endeavour on an industrial scale! So what happened? Well, the Europeans decided we’d produce those peripheral crops like sugar cane, tobacco, and spices – while importing most consumable food from Europe – to keep their farmers working!!

Now all of this we already know: hadn’t Burnham and Manley struck their leftist pose and decided we were going to feed ourselves?? They were talking about “food security” before there was “food insecurity”?? Not really!! They were reacting to their economies collapsing like houses of cards and they just didn’t have the foreign exchange to import the foods we’d been weaned on. And craved. After all it wasn’t apocryphal that Burnham cried out for “condensed milk” on his death bed, was it??

Anyhow while there’s nothing wrong about growing our own food and moving off “foreign foods” what they attempted was an ancient economic notion called “autarky”! That is you must be completely self-sufficient and become an island (no pun intended!!) unto yourself!! This had been discredited by the “free trade” theory where you concentrate on things where you have (and can acquire) a comparative advantage – produce and export those things – then use the foreign exchange earned to buy whatever other things you desired!!But we never learn. So we now have Jamaican MP Lisa Hannah pointing out that they’re producing irish potato all right – but at EIGHT TIMES the imported price!! And we’re following suit!!

Crazy!!

…of mind

It’s said that every man’s home is his castle – with the expectation that he’s gonna be left in peace to do as he pleases there. But even though the Middle Ages are long gone and one would’ve thought folks using battering rams to break into castles were over and done with, from the eighties we had our “kick-down-the-door-bandits”. Inspired by the PNC’s terroristic onslaught on the citizenry to keep them cowed for Burnham’s dictatorship. That’s left a lasting legacy of windows and doors grated with steel bars so most Guyanese actually live voluntarily in JAILS!! But there still isn’t security of mind in the grated castles – witness reports of folks regularly burglarized and even killed.

But now, there’s another irony – with oil revenues pouring in and our GDP the fastest growing in the WORLD, who’d think at folks are living from paycheck-to-paycheck?? But it does take some time for the economy to adjust to our 14.5% take of the oil profits, doesn’t it??Sadly, there’s no way around that.

…of tenure

How come UG’s been around for almost 60 years and their graduates can barely read and comprehend beyond primary school level?? Cause the staff has the security of tenure where they are never evaluated and can’t be fired!!

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door Sharon Singh PARAMARIBO — “De reden waarom wij deze grote stap hebben genomen is om de Surinamers te laten

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