In June of last year, we reported on the very unusual decision coming out of the Court of Appeal. The appellant, Gilbert Henry, spent 5 years in jail after being convicted of dangerous harm, only to have the Appeal Court rule that he should not have been convicted in the first place. Well, the Director of Public Prosecutions has successfully appealed that decision all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice, which ruled today that indeed Henry was guilty.
In 2012 Henry stood trial in the Supreme Court for attempted murder. He was accused of stabbing Ellis Taibo in a bar in 2008. Taibo ended up hospitalized for 6 weeks due to a collapsed lung.
A jury found him not guilty of attempted murder, but guilty of the alternate charge of dangerous harm. He was sentenced to spend 5 years in jail, and days after his conviction, he filed an appeal.
Henry spent the entire duration of his prison sentence, and he was released from prison months before his case actually came up before the Court of Appeal. The judges there dismissed the appeal, thus affirming his conviction and sentence.
That should have been the end of this matter, but months later in June of 2017, the judges of the Court of Appeal delivered the final written judgment in which they set aside his conviction and his sentence of 5 years. Basically, the court completely changed its mind about his guilt, and it then told him that he sat in jail for 5 years for nothing.
The DPP strongly disagreed, and she believed it irregular that the judges would render a judgment one way, only to make a complete reversal with the written judgment. She decided to press the issue at the CCJ, which heard her appeal a few weeks ago.
And, most unusually, the CCJ delivered a judgment today restoring Henry's conviction, completely reversing the Court of Appeal's written decision.
But more importantly, the CCJ ruled in the DPP's favor that once a court delivers an oral decision, it is normally binding from the moment that the court makes a pronouncement of it. They did caution that what the Court of Appeal did was allowable, but such a drastic amendment should only be done in exceptional circumstances. The CCJ found that once judges have any doubts about their decisions, they should reserve judgment to a later date, when they can fully make up their minds about how the case should be ruled. In this instance, the CCJ ruled that the Court of Appeal judges wrongly exercised their jurisdiction to change their minds about this case.
It's a vindication of DPP Cheryl-Lynn Vidal's position on case of Gilbert Henry, and after the teleconference hearing this afternoon, here's what she had to say:
Cheryl-Lynn Vidal - Director of Public Prosecutions
"The court has now ruled in our favor, and the court has now reinstated the oral of the decision of the court dismissed Henry's appeal, and confirmed his conviction and sentence. The ground on which the court had reversed itself was in relation to the jury's act, and the court seemed to have been saying in the judgment that for every decision of the jury, the jury must have retired for at least 2 hours. And that was never, in our view, been the interpretation of section 21 of the Jury's Act. And so, we sought clarification from the court, and the court agreed with us."
"The more fundamental issue was the fact that the court had also said in the judgment that had they not declared the trial a nullity because the Jury's Act point, that they would have still allowed the appeal because there would have been a miscarriage of justice, since Mr. Henry's appeal had been significantly delayed."
"Our argument was never that his rights were not breached by the delay in the hearing of the appeal. That was not what we put forward at the Court of Appeal. Our argument was that given those circumstances, what is the remedy? Is the only remedy available to quash his conviction? Our response was no. What we submitted was that the court should look at what was available to see whether or not he had been properly convicted, and if he had been properly convicted. And if he had been properly convicted, on the evidence, then the remedy could not be to simply quash his conviction because there was a delay in the hearing of the appeal. And, the CCJ has agreed with us."
We also got a chance to speak with Gilbert Henry's attorney, Kevin Arthurs, since the vindication he and his client got at the Court of Appeal, was reversed. He told us that the real issue that his client complained about, which is the breach of his constitutional rights to have his appeal heard in a reasonable time is still left unanswered. Here's how he explained it to us today, and here's what the DPP had to say on some of the points he raised:
Kevin Arthurs - Attorney for Gilbert Henry
"The complaint of the Director Public Prosecution was that the manner in which something was done was not in in accordance with the rules of the court are. But, we're missing the entire substance of what the original appeal is about. And that is what I want to get back to. It's important to note that Mr. Henry has already served his entire sentence. So, this case is actually an embarrassment to our justice system. It's an embarrassment to the office that's prosecutes. It's an embarrassment to the court system. I like the way the court put it. I think it's a huge victory for - as far as the court could have gone under the circumstances. The court was very clear that what was complained about are what they refer to as procedural lapses."
"But more importantly, and I think the most important line in the entire judgment that because of what happened, which is extremely unfortunate, that Mr. Henry's right to an appeal had been reduced to an illusion. It is impossible. It is unacceptable that in Belize, that a man serves out his entire sentence without his appeal being heard."
"I think what we've avoided, is we've avoided to answer the question as to what happens in this country when the system commits a wrong."
"In a criminal trial, the most important document, or part of the trial is the summation, what the judge tells the jury. Jury, provocation means x,y and z. Self-defense means x, y, and z, and they take that into consideration. I would say that - I don't want to put a figure on it - but a very large number of the cases which are overturned, are because there is a difficulty in the summation, and that , the courts found, they didn't have available to them."
Cheryl-Lyn Vidal
"In this particular case, there was a transcript of the actual trial, but there was no summation, but the court would have been able to look at the evidence that was led, and the circumstances, make a determination as to whether, even if we were to say that there may have been some errors in the summation, would this jury inevitably have convicted. And this exactly the point that the CCJ has made in this case, that even if there were defects in the summing up, there would not have been enough to warrant the court saying that this conviction should be quashed."
Kevin Arthurs
"There is no way that any fair minded person can say that the transcript, there was enough in the transcript to, in fact, warrant the conviction, in my opinion. That's just my opinion."
Cheryl-Lynn Vidal
"In this particular case, Mr. Henry had gone himself after the incident, to the police, admitted what he had done, and given them the weapon that he used. In court he didn't really challenge the facts of the case very strongly, granted that he was unrepresented, but the facts were very clear as to what it is had taken place. And it could not have lent to any conclusion that there was a miscarriage of justice."
So, what about the defense's biggest complaint that Gilbert Henry's right to a fair trial within a reasonable time was violated? Often times on this newscast, we tell you about persons who sit in jail for years only to be acquitted. So, we asked the DPP about that, about how some have come to the cynical conclusion that time spent on remand, while awaiting trial, becomes the only punishment that accused murderers end up facing. Here's what she had to say on that:
Daniel Ortiz
"Remand becomes the punitive measure against a defendant, instead of an actual conviction in some instances."
Cheryl-Lynn Vidal
"Yes, it is a fact. There's no getting around it that there is a significant problem in the system. It's not for want of the court doing work. You'd have noted that we have additional judges now to clear the backlog. The Chief Justice had been instrumental in introducing criminal procedure rules, which are supposed to look at speeding up the trial of matters. The main difficulty, Daniel, is the volume of work that the courts have. There are a number of persons on remand because there are a number of murder cases that have passed through the system, and they can't well be tried at once. But, I know that the Chief Justice is painfully aware of the situation, and he's trying to implement measures to ensure that the matters that are currently on the list are dealt with as quickly as possible."
There are discussions of a possible class action suit for accused persons like Henry, who may have faced long delays in their appeals. We'll tell you if it actually reaches that phase.
Email
Print