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A London appeals court docket 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 have 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 determination, the appeals court docket dominated that the decide 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 court docket wrote Thursday. “Permitting Juror X to proceed to serve on the jury is deadly to the protection of the convictions which adopted. This was an infringement of the defendants’ basic proper to a good listening to by an impartial and neutral court docket.”
The choice got here from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a London court docket 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 court docket 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 that they had killed Williams after he did not return two unlicensed firearms that they had lent him.
However on the ultimate day of the trial, the decide was informed 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 data, the decide was confronted with an unusually troublesome selection. As a result of one other juror had already been discharged over a separate concern, 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 doable merely to discharge a miscreant juror and to permit the remaining members of the jury to return verdicts [but] that was not doable right here,” the appeals court docket wrote Thursday.
Although the appeals court docket mentioned it had “appreciable sympathy with the decide’s dilemma,” it mentioned the choice to proceed with the problematic juror had been a “severe irregularity” that may end in a “miscarriage of justice” if allowed to face.
“In coming to this conclusion, the Board is conscious of the very severe penalties which can stream from having to discharge a jury shortly earlier than the top of an extended and sophisticated prison trial,” the appeals court docket 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 might be events on which, as within the current case, a court docket may have no various however to discharge a jury and finish the trial with a purpose to shield the integrity of the system of trial by jury,” the court docket wrote.
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