A ju­ry de­lib­er­at­ed for less than two hours be­fore ac­quit­ting Ray Paul Julien of a 12-year-old mur­der charge.

Julien had stood tri­al be­fore Jus­tice Tri­cia Hudlin-Coop­er in the San Fer­nan­do Supreme Court, charged with the mur­der of At­i­ba Worme on May 13, 2013. Worme was fa­tal­ly shot in the back on Wa­ter­hole Road, Co­corite, near Jesse Lane.

Julien was sub­se­quent­ly charged af­ter be­ing pos­i­tive­ly iden­ti­fied by two wit­ness­es.

One of the state wit­ness­es, Do­minic Gre­goire, had tes­ti­fied in the mag­is­trate’s court that he saw Julien shoot Worme. How­ev­er, Gre­goire died be­fore the case reached the High Court, and his state­ments and de­po­si­tion were ten­dered as ev­i­dence dur­ing the tri­al.

The oth­er eye­wit­ness had orig­i­nal­ly claimed to have seen Julien run­ning af­ter the de­ceased, but said he ran off af­ter Worme fell. Dur­ing the tri­al, he tes­ti­fied that he had been threat­ened by Gre­goire to false­ly iden­ti­fy Julien as the shoot­er. He added that he could nei­ther read nor write and that the state­ments he signed had been writ­ten by po­lice. The wit­ness was deemed hos­tile and was cross-ex­am­ined by the pros­e­cu­tors.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the state­ments and mag­is­trate court de­po­si­tion of an­oth­er wit­ness, Giliani Ashe, who had al­so since died, were read to the ju­ry. Ashe had ini­tial­ly been a state wit­ness but was deemed hos­tile, claim­ing he was locked in a par­lour by a po­lice of­fi­cer and forced to give a state­ment against Julien.

The State was rep­re­sent­ed by at­tor­neys Des­ti­nee Gray and Mel­lis­sa Bood­hai, while Julien was rep­re­sent­ed by at­tor­neys Nicholas Ram­per­sads­ingh and Lau­ri­na Ramkar­ran. - Sascha Wil­son