The Court of Appeal has reserved its decision in an appeal, which is expected to provide guidance to High Court Judges, prosecutors and defence attorneys on the use of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence in criminal trials.
Appellate Judges Alice Yorke-Soo Hon, Mark Mohammed, and Maria Wilson reserved their decision after hearing submissions from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the Public Defenders Department and attorneys for Emerson “Roger” Richardson, who is challenging his conviction for raping a minor.
While DNA evidence has been used in a handful of criminal cases before and after Richardson was convicted of the crime in 2018, his case is important as it is the first to raise concerns over DNA evidence before the Court of Appeal.
Presenting submissions on behalf of the DPP’s Office, prosecutor Nigel Pilgrim gave suggestions on possible practice directions or criminal procedure rules amendments that can be introduced by the Judiciary to improve the introduction of such evidence.
He noted that while the DNA Act only requires test results to be immediately shared with an investigating officer, the directions could provide guidance on subsequent disclosure to defence attorneys. He also suggested that DNA experts could be required to provide their detailed qualifications and an explanation on the scientific principles behind the testing and analysis they performed, that can be considered by a jury when deciding an accused person’s guilt or innocence.
Responding to issues over the accreditation of the Forensic Science Centre, which performed the testing in Richardson’s case, Pilgrim noted that a private lab received accreditation from the State earlier this year. Referring specifically to Richardson’s case, Pilgrim said that despite the minor issues with the DNA evidence, there was other compelling evidence linking him to the crime. He noted that Richardson was accused of attacking the victim three times but the jury only convicted him on one of the incidents, in which the victim’s mother, who was in a relationship with the accused, caught him lying naked on top of her daughter.
He also noted that Richardson had a 16 point match to the semen found in the victim.
In her submissions, Richardson’s lawyer Sophia Chote, SC, complained over the delay in prosecutors receiving the test results and disclosing them to her client’s attorney, who represented him during his trial. She noted that based on the evidence, prosecutors were allowed to amend the charge against her client. She claimed that the delayed amendment was prejudicial to Richardson as he had to defend issues that did not arise when he was first charged or put through a preliminary inquiry.
She also pointed out the judge who presided over Richardson’s trial placed too much weight on his defence that the semen found in the victim’s vagina was “innocently transferred” as she slept on the same bed that he and her mother had used to have sex earlier that day.
In the Public Defenders Department submissions, attorney Raphael Morgan took issue with the fact that the country does not have a DNA database used by DNA experts to calculate the probability of a random person in the local population having the same matches in a case. While Morgan claimed that a United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) database of citizens and residents of Caribbean descent was used in previous cases, Morgan could not say what percentage of the persons in that database were originally from T&T.
Richardson is also being represented by Allan Andersson.
The appeal panel did not set a date for its decision and would notify the parties when it does so.