THE Supreme Court yesterday awarded a little over $26 million in damages to two men who sued the government following an overturn of their conviction and sentences by the Privy Council for the murder of a police corporal in Spanish Town, St Catherine 11 years ago.

Mark Sangster, 41, was awarded $13,450,500 while his co-accused, Randal Dixon, 42, was awarded a sum of $13,192,500 by Justice Donald McIntosh.

Both men, who are residents of Portmore, St Catherine, in 2005, sued the state for false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, breach of their constitutional rights and for exemplary and aggravated damages following the October 7, 2002 Privy Council ruling.

The two were in 1998 found guilty of murdering Acting Detective Corporal Phillip Gordon while allegedly in the process of robbing a Western Union branch of $18 million in September 1996 along with other armed men. Another police officer, Special Constable Valimore Lawman, was shot and injured in the incident.

Sangster was sentenced to life and Dixon was sentenced to be hanged.

The men, however, took the matter to the United Kingdom-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council two years after their conviction after it came out in court that the police had failed to disclose that a security camera at the Western Union branch, on the day in question, never captured the men who were said to have entered the establishment.

As a result of this piece of evidence the Privy Council, Jamaica’s final court of appeal, set aside the men’s conviction and quashed their sentences.