A London appeals courtroom on Thursday (Mar. 14) overturned the homicide conviction of Jamaican dancehall star Vybz Kartel, ruling that the 2014 responsible verdict was tainted by allegations that one juror tried to bribe others.
The ruling got here greater than a decade after Kartel — a preferred Jamaican artist who has labored with Rihanna, Jay-Z and others — and three others had been convicted in Kingston, Jamaica of the 2011 killing of an affiliate named Clive “Lizard” Williams, whose physique was by no means discovered.
Within the choice, the appeals courtroom dominated that the choose overseeing the 2014 trial had made a “deadly” error: permitting the jury to proceed to a verdict regardless of information that one of many jurors had tried to bribe others. That juror was not eliminated, and shortly after the jury returned a responsible verdict.
“There ought to have been no query of permitting Juror X to proceed to serve on the jury,” the appeals courtroom wrote Thursday. “Permitting Juror X to proceed to serve on the jury is deadly to the security of the convictions which adopted. This was an infringement of the defendants’ elementary proper to a good listening to by an impartial and neutral courtroom.”
The choice got here from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a London courtroom that decides last-resort appeals from sure nations belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations, together with Jamaica.
The ruling overturned Kartel’s conviction and his 32-year jail sentence, however he might nonetheless face a retrial on the identical accusations. The appeals courtroom mentioned that Jamaican courts would determine whether or not such a trial will happen.
Kartel — together with co-defendants Shawn Campbell, Kahira Jones and Andre St John — confronted a 64-day jury trial in early 2014 over accusations that they’d killed Williams after he didn’t return two unlicensed firearms they’d lent him.
However on the ultimate day of the trial, the choose was instructed that Juror X had tried to “persuade one other member of the jury” to acquit the defendants by providing bribes of 500,000 Jamaican {dollars} (roughly $3,200 US).
After receiving that info, the choose was confronted with an unusually tough selection. As a result of one other juror had already been discharged over a separate problem, the one selection was to finish the trial fully after weeks of testimony or permit the case to proceed to a verdict.
“It may need been attainable merely to discharge a miscreant juror and to permit the remaining members of the jury to return verdicts [but] that was not attainable right here,” the appeals courtroom wrote Thursday.
Although the appeals courtroom mentioned it had “appreciable sympathy with the choose’s dilemma,” it mentioned the choice to proceed with the problematic juror had been a “critical irregularity” that may lead to a “miscarriage of justice” if allowed to face.
“In coming to this conclusion, the Board is aware of the very critical penalties which can move from having to discharge a jury shortly earlier than the top of a protracted and sophisticated felony trial,” the appeals courtroom wrote, noting that England has statutes aimed toward coping with such conditions.
“Nevertheless, within the absence of such a provision — and there’s no such provision in Jamaica — there shall be events on which, as within the current case, a courtroom can have no various however to discharge a jury and finish the trial as a way to defend the integrity of the system of trial by jury,” the courtroom wrote.