Lescene Edwards, the former cop who was in 2013 sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his girlfriend Aldonna Harris-Vasquez in 2003, has had his conviction overturned by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the final Court of Appeal of Jamaica, in delivering the judgement Monday said “a substantial miscarriage of justice has occurred and that the conviction of Edwards (a former Constable) cannot stand”.

Harris-Vasquez died on September 5, 2003 from a single gunshot wound to the head. Despite a suicide note being found near her body, the case had centred on whether Edwards, who was arrested and charged with her murder, fired the fatal shot or if it was self-inflicted.

The prosecution’s handwriting expert had testified during the trial that Edwards wrote the purported suicide note. The defence’s own handwriting expert was inconclusive in his analysis of the ‘suicide’ note and Edwards’ writing.

The prosecution alleged that on the night of September 5, 2003, Edwards had visited Harris-Vasquez, the mother of his two children, and shot her in the bathroom of her home, staging the murder to look like a suicide. Despite serious failings around the gathering and storing of essential evidence, a lack of adequate forensic expert testimony, and a trial delay of 10 years, Edwards was convicted of Harris-Vasquez’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, with possibility of parole only after serving a minimum of 35 years.

In his appeal before the Privy Council, heard from February 15 to 16, 2022, Edwards’s lawyers presented arguments that extensive delays in the trial and appellate process had breached his constitutional right to trial within a reasonable time. They also argued that there were serious deficiencies in the safety of Edwards’s conviction and that a miscarriage of justice had occurred; during the initial police investigation vital evidence such as the clothes worn by Edwards and the gun and holster had not been sent for forensic testing, and that other evidence, such as the clothes worn by the deceased, had been destroyed by the police before trial. Edwards’s lawyers also applied to have fresh evidence admitted by the Privy Council, including reports from ballistics, gunshot residue and blood spatter forensic experts.

Considering the admission of the fresh forensic evidence, the Privy Council on Monday stated: “there is simply no satisfactory explanation of how the defendant could have managed to murder the deceased in the very confined space of the bathroom, then move the body, open the door and appear a very short time afterwards in the living room without any blood being seen on him or his clothes, and without any bloodstains or bloodied footprints being found anywhere outside the bathroom…There is a world of difference between a lawyer’s assertion that the prosecution theory is implausible and expert evidence that shows, in the words of Mrs Leak, that the suicide hypothesis is far more likely than the murder one.”

– Alicia Dunkley-Willis