Six men freed of murder after 14 years in Trinidad jail
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) – Six men who spent 14 years in prison were on Wednesday allowed to walk free after the judge found them not guilty of murdering a man in 2009.
The men – Victor “Barry” Alphonso, Marlon “Simo” Seymour, Marvin “Menace” Agard, Frankie “Fishiee” Bartholomew, Darryl “Chinee” Wade, and Randy “Plopee” St Rose, were found not guilty of murder at the end of the judge-alone trial before Justice Devan Rampersad at the Hall of Justice here.
The men were accused of murdering 23-year-old Shivon “Tupac” Lewis, of Lodge Place, on April 12, 2009.
According to police reports, Lewis was attending a wake at his girlfriend’s home, when he was shot and killed.
In the trial, prosecutors relied on the evidence of the State’s main witness Adrian Johnson, who actually did not witness the murder but claimed to have been present when the six men were planning it.
Johnson gave a series of sworn statements to police and testified during the preliminary inquiry in the case before passing away in June 2014.
Prosecutors were permitted to use Johnson’s deposition from the preliminary inquiry in the group’s eventual trial before Justice Rampersad.
After prosecutors closed their case against the men, their defence attorneys made no-case submissions in which they challenged the reliability of Johnson’s evidence.
Although the no-case submissions were eventually overruled by Justice Rampersad, he essentially upheld the claims made by the men’s defence attorneys over Johnson as he acquitted them.
Rampersad noted that Johnson’s evidence was purely circumstantial and not corroborated by any other evidence.
Noting that Johnson only came forward to the police almost two months after Lewis was killed, Rampersad stated he had a strong motive to lie as in one of his statements to the police, he admitted to implicating them after a disagreement and hoped to be placed in witness protection.
Rampersad also pointed to numerous inconsistencies in Johnson’s statements as he ruled that he could not rely on his claims to convict the men.
