Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dana See­ta­hal has said pro­posed amend­ments to the Ev­i­dence Bill were need­ed to stop the col­lapse of tri­als from wit­ness in­tim­i­da­tion.

"Peo­ple come in to the po­lice at the time the in­ci­dent hap­pens, hot and sweaty, and they say I saw this per­son kill my friend or my broth­er or my moth­er," See­ta­hal said in yes­ter­day's de­bate of the bill in the Sen­ate. "Then they go back to the place they have to live and they get threat­ened. They get mon­ey. Most of the times they get threat­ened that, 'some­thing would hap­pen to you and you do not want to go ahead.'" She said the ad­mis­sion of in­con­sis­tent state­ments was re­quired to save T&T's crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.

"'I can­not re­mem­ber. I for­got. I am suf­fer­ing from am­ne­sia. It did not hap­pen. I lied.' Mr Pres­i­dent I have been in­volved in so many cas­es where that has hap­pened," See­ta­hal said.

"Wit­ness­es are like­ly to change their minds all too fre­quent­ly, so we need to have be­fore a ju­ry both sets of ev­i­dence, the orig­i­nal state­ments and what they are say­ing cur­rent­ly." See­ta­hal re­ferred to a lo­cal homi­cide case that saw the wit­ness, who was al­so a mur­der ac­cused, make claims of mem­o­ry loss while on tri­al. She said: "The wit­ness in that case al­so was charged with mur­der in an­oth­er mat­ter and he came be­fore the courts and said 'He for­got, He for­got, He for­got'."