Jamaican entertainer Vybz Kartel and his three co-convicts will, in less than a week, know whether their 2014 convictions for the murder of Clive “Lizard” Williams have been upheld by Jamaica’s final appellate court, the United Kingdom-based Privy Council.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, in a statement to Jamaican media entities on Friday, indicated that the anticipated ruling will be handed down on Thursday, March 14, at 11:00 am Jamaica time. The indication comes a mere three weeks after the matter was heard by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council over two days, starting on February 15. Kartel’s attorneys had requested an expedited decision based on the diagnosis of their client with a supposedly life-threatening illness.
The panel comprising the president of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Lord Reed, Lord Lloyd-Jones, Lord Briggs, Lord Burrows, and Lady Simler, was asked to decide whether the convictions of Vybz Kartel, whose given name is Adidja Palmer, and his co-convicts Shawn Campbell, Kahira Jones, and Andre St John were safe, based on three grounds. Attorneys for Kartel asked the body to rule on whether the original trial should have excluded the telecommunications evidence relied on by the prosecution and how he should have handled the allegations that there were attempts to bribe members of the jury during the trial, specifically whether that jury should have been discharged. Furthermore, the panel was asked to rule on whether the judge was wrong to invite the jury to reach a verdict late in the day, given the special circumstances of the case.
After the highly publicized trial, which lasted 64 days before a judge and a jury in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston, the four were convicted of Williams’ murder. The prosecution’s case was that the appellants murdered Williams on August 16, 2011, after he failed to return two unlicensed firearms that Palmer had given him for safekeeping. Williams has not been seen or heard from since that date, and his body has never been found.
The police took the men into custody on September 30, 2011, and seized their cellular telephones. The prosecution relied heavily on evidence derived from these phones, taken from a copy of a CD provided by telecommunications provider Digicel in response to a police request. At the trial, the attorneys for the men challenged the admissibility of this telecommunications evidence. They argued that the police request to Digicel and Digicel’s provision of data to the police were carried out in breach of the Interception of Communications Act.
Further, they contended that the evidence had been obtained in breach of the fundamental right to the protection of privacy of communication guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms contained in The Jamaica Constitution. However, the trial judge ruled that the telecommunications evidence was admissible.
During the trial, the judge became aware of an allegation that a juror had attempted to bribe others by offering $500,000 for a particular outcome. After investigating the allegation and considering it with counsel for both the prosecution and the defense, the judge decided that the trial should proceed. He did not discharge the jury, nor the particular juror said to have offered the bribes.
The judge concluded his summing up at 3:42 pm on March 13, 2014. The jury returned at 5:35 pm, when the forewoman told the court that the jury had not reached a unanimous verdict. The judge sent the jury out again. At 6:08 pm, the jury returned and, by a majority of 10 to 1, handed down the convictions for the murder of Williams.
After the Court of Appeal dismissed the men’s appeal against their conviction, the matter was escalated to the Privy Council.
