Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

Two men were ac­quit­ted of sep­a­rate mur­der charges fol­low­ing judge-alone tri­als at the Hall of Jus­tice in Port-of-Spain ear­li­er this week.

Seko Nicholas and Je­re­my Yeates were freed af­ter judges ruled there was in­suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to con­vict them in their re­spec­tive cas­es on Tues­day.

Nicholas was be­fore High Court Judge Hay­den St Clair-Dou­glas ac­cused of mur­der­ing Trev­elle Smith at Bel­mont Val­ley Road in Bel­mont on March 22, 2010. 

Dur­ing his tri­al, the State’s main wit­ness, who im­pli­cat­ed Nicholas, was deemed hos­tile af­ter he sought to change his ev­i­dence giv­en dur­ing the pre­lim­i­nary in­quiry in the case sev­er­al years ago. 

Nicholas, who claimed that he went to a friend’s house to bor­row a video game at the time of Smith’s mur­der, tes­ti­fied in his de­fence.

He al­so called an eye­wit­ness to the shoot­ing, who claimed that he was not the shoot­er. 

Nicholas was rep­re­sent­ed by Mario Mer­ritt and Ran­dall Raphael.

Yeates was on tri­al for mur­der­ing Wayne Roberts on No­vem­ber 14, 2015. 

Roberts was dri­ving along Seales Av­enue in Mor­vant when he was shot sev­er­al times.

He man­aged to dri­ve away but lost con­scious­ness and crashed at the in­ter­sec­tion of La­dy Young Road and the East­ern Main Road. 

He died while re­ceiv­ing treat­ment at the hos­pi­tal. 

Dur­ing his tri­al be­fore Jus­tice Trevor Jones, which be­gan last week, pros­e­cu­tors re­lied on three state­ments al­leged­ly giv­en by Roberts to the po­lice be­fore he suc­cumbed to his gun­shot in­juries. 

Roberts iden­ti­fied Yeates as his at­tack­er.

Yeates’ lawyer Collin El­bourne and Tonya Thomas of the Pub­lic De­fend­ers’ De­part­ment (PDD) made a no case sub­mis­sion based on de­fi­cien­cies in Roberts’ pur­port­ed iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Yeates. 

They not­ed that Roberts failed to in­di­cate whether he had an op­por­tu­ni­ty to see the face of the gun­man, how long he had an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ob­serve the gun­man, whether any­thing pre­vent­ed him from ob­serv­ing the gun­man, and the dis­tance he was from the gun­man when the shoot­ing be­gan.

In up­hold­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion, Jus­tice Jones agreed with the weak­ness­es in Robert’s ev­i­dence and not­ed that there was no oth­er ev­i­dence to in­crim­i­nate Yeates. 

Yeates was pros­e­cut­ed by Solange De­venish and Tam­my Cato.