PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) – The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) Monday unanimously upheld the sexual assault conviction of Barbadian Clarence Sealy, 67, who was sentenced to five years in jail for indecently assaulting a six year old girl

CCJ buildThe five-member CCJ panel of judges dismissed the appeal and affirmed his sentence of five years’ imprisonment.  Sealy had been convicted in May 2011.

Sealy’s appeal was based on two grounds. His lawyers argued that the trial judge had wrongly allowed the police officers in the case to read aloud from their notebooks certain admissions they said Sealy had made at the police station when he was being interviewed.

Sealy said he had not signed or otherwise acknowledged making these admissions and denied having made them at the trial.

He also argued that the trial judge had not properly warned the jury on how to deal with the admissions. But the CCJ in dismissing the first ground of appeal acknowledged that the trial judge had made some errors in the course of allowing the police witnesses to read aloud the unauthenticated admissions, but the found that there was sufficient evidence outside of the police testimonies on which Sealy could have been convicted. As such, the CCJ found that Sealy had suffered no injustice.

Justice Nelson took the view that the trial judge had acted properly throughout when she dealt with the unsigned statements and gave permission to the police officers to read aloud from their notebooks.

Regarding the second ground of appeal, the court unanimously held that the trial judge’s summing-up in this particular case was adequate.

The court also gave extensive guidance to Barbadian trial judges on how they should approach unsigned statements made by suspects and also on the directions that must be given to the jury when such statements have been admitted into evidence.

It also endorsed the views of Justice Anderson who criticised the continued suspension of the section of the Barbados Evidence Act which provides for audio and video recording of police interviews of suspects. It was noted that electronic recording provides the most reliable means of ascertaining the validity of confessions and had this technology been used in the case, many of the contentious issues discussed would not have arisen.