The six years and six months at hard labour sentence delivered on Friday to 24-year-old quality analyst Rushelle Foster, who was in January found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter for the 2019 stabbing death of national senior women’s footballer Tarania “Plum Plum” Clarke, hit differently for the Reggae Girl’s grieving relatives who missed the handing down of the ruling, despite being present on the court premises.

Clarke’s family, in describing the sentence as “unfair”, said it in no way compensates for the grief they have lived with since the killing.

“My sister not a troublemaker, my sister is a peacemaker, and we are living in grief. This year a go mek five years my sister pass and we are living in grief; this is not justice,” a sibling of Clarke’s told the Jamaica Observer on Friday after Justice Leighton Pusey handed down the punishment in the Home Circuit Division of the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston.

The family members, who had been present for every moment of the eight-day trial, said their heartache was magnified by the fact that they missed the sentencing.

“It unfair, it unfair bad. She get an unfair death and an unfair trial. We were here from before 10:00 am. They said the matter (sentencing) will be at 2:00 pm, so we went to have lunch and when we returned after 1:00 pm we hear say sentence pass and court done,” one disappointed sibling shared.

Clarke’s mother, Charmaine Riley-Clarke, a woman of few words, described the situation as a let-down.

“That is not fair and that is not right. I feel disrespected. It really unfair to see she stab my daughter two time and they bring it down to manslaughter and at the end of the day now when we come they mislead us and tell we it’s 2:00 pm and after we come back they turn off the light in the courthouse,” she said, referring to the fact that while her family waited outside the facility the sentence was handed down, the courtroom vacated and the lights turned off.

“It is disrespectful and unfair,” Riley-Clarke said.

“At the end of the day it makes it look like no family member or relative turned up for the deceased,” Clarke’s niece chimed in.

When the Observer enquired about the change in time, the newspaper was told that the trial judge had called the matter forward because the court reporter assigned to the courtroom for that day had a personal difficulty.

The Observer further learnt that the family members were not notified of the change because the prosecutor manning the matters slated for that court room on Friday was not the prosecutor who had led the evidence in the trial and who was familiar with the relatives.

The Observer was told that the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions would reach out to the aggrieved family members to explain.

Clarke, a rising star in the sporting arena, was stabbed to death during a reported dispute over a cellular phone with Foster about 8:50 pm on October 31, 2019 at Limelight Plaza in Half-Way-Tree.

During the trial Foster had claimed that she acted in self-defence, insisting that she would have been the one to die if the footballer, who she said was fuming over the fact that she had called it quits on their “toxic” seven-month sexual relationship, had got hold of the weapon used to stab her.

On Friday, Justice Pusey, from a starting point of seven years which he said was the normal range for such offences, added two years for the aggravating factors of the killing, which included the fact that Foster was armed and Clarke was not and that two wounds were inflicted on Clarke. He, however, deducted a year from the resulting nine years for the mitigating factors which included the fact that Foster had no previous convictions, was just 21 years old at the time of the killing, and had received a positive community report. Foster was also given a discount for the year and six months already spent behind bars.

Attorney Courtney Rowe, who represented Foster, said his client was “visibly dissatisfied with the sentence”. He told the Observer that an appeal might be in the wings.

“I don’t have any firm instructions right now, but she did express a desire of speaking with her family about going that route. We, the defence, are of the view that the judge did not properly explain to the jury when they came back requesting further guidance,” Rowe said.

On the day the trial went to the jury, after being instructed by the judge, they returned to the courtroom armed with the verdict. The foreman, when asked to relay the finding, said “Guilty of murder without intent” at which point Justice Pusey, in seeking to elicit what was meant by that utterance, gave further instructions and again sent the jury from the courtroom. When they returned, the foreman, when asked to indicate the decision, said the unanimous finding was that Foster was “guilty of manslaughter”.

“The guidance he gave was inadequate. We believe if he had given more complete instructions, then the finding of the jury would have been different, following on the utterance the foreman made that they didn’t find that Miss Foster had an intention to kill. We are saying the judge did not assist them properly at that point when they were seeking clarification,” the attorney said.