Raymond Hunter v R

• Jurisdiction: Jamaica
• Judge: MORRISON JA
• Judgment Date: 19 May 2011
• Neutral Citation: JM 2011 CA 42
• Court: Court of Appeal (Jamaica)
• Docket Number: SUPREME COURT CRIMINAL APPEAL NO. 105/2007
• Date: 19 May 2011

[2011] JMCA Crim 20

JAMAICA

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL

BEFORE:

THE HON. MR JUSTICE MORRISON JA

THE HON. MISS JUSTICE PHILLIPS JA

THE HON. MRS JUSTICE McINTOSH JA

SUPREME COURT CRIMINAL APPEAL NO. 105/2007

RAYMOND HUNTER

and

R

Miss Althea McBean for the appellant

Miss Maxine Jackson and Adley Duncan for the Crown

CRIMINAL LAW - Wounding with intent - Identification evidence - Circumstantial evidence - Excessive sentence - Unreasonable verdict

MORRISON JA

1 On 26 June 2007, the appellant was convicted of the offence of wounding with intent, after a trial before Gayle J and a jury in the Circuit Court for the parish of Saint Mary and, on 6 July 2007, he was sentenced to imprisonment for 25 years at hard labour. The appellant's application for leave to appeal was considered and granted by a single judge of this court on 8 January 2009. On 15 April 2011 we heard the appeal and made the order expressed in para. [42] below. We promised then to put our reasons in writing. This we now do.

2 The appellant was charged on an indictment containing a single count of wounding with intent, the particulars of which were that on 30 May 2005 he had, in the parish of Saint Mary, wounded Mr Barrington Beckford with intent to cause him grievous bodily harm. To this indictment the appellant pleaded not guilty.

3 The offence for which the appellant was charged and convicted allegedly took place, unusually, in the Oracabessa Police Station (“the station”). In the early evening of 30 May 2005, the appellant was one of some 19 or 20 prisoners in detention in the cell block of the station. The complainant, Mr Barrington Beckford, was a detective sergeant of police and the supervisor on duty at the station that evening. Also on duty at the station at the time were Miss Paulette Johnson and Mr Garfield Stennett, both of whom were district constables, and Mr Walworth Duncan, also a detective sergeant of police. The first three of these police officers were the witnesses as to the facts for the prosecution, while the fourth was the investigating officer.

4 At about 7:30 that evening, District Constable Johnson and her colleague, District Constable Stennett, both of whom were unarmed, were in the process of escorting a male prisoner to the cell block at the station. It appears from the evidence that the cell block was separated from the rest of the station by a gate, which was usually kept locked. When District Constable Stennett arrived at the gate, he opened it and placed the prisoner in front of him, before following about three feet behind him through the gate. Suddenly, a group of prisoners inside the cell block attacked District Constable Stennett and, as District Constable Johnson was in the process of closing the gate, a number of them threw themselves against the gate. As one of the prisoners started to throw punches at her, District Constable Johnson saw the appellant, who was previously known to her, come forward and grab her by the hair. A struggle ensued between them, during which the appellant, who was ‘patting’ District Constable Johnson in the area of her waist, attempted to pull her into the recreation area of the station, that is, away from the cell block. However, District Constable Stennett came to her rescue and pulled the appellant away from her, leaving her free to run from the cell block and into the recreation area.

5 District Constable Stennett largely confirmed District Constable Johnson's account and he too identified the appellant as the second of the two prisoners who had attacked her. He saw when the appellant held on to her hair and started to search her body and confirmed that he then went to her assistance. Finally, when District Constable Johnson got free, she ran towards the recreation area, closely followed by District Constable Stennett. The suggestion put to District Constable Stennett in cross examination that there were more than two prisoners in the passageway behind the gate leading to the cell block was denied by him, though he did say that there was a third prisoner who was in the shower at the time.

6 During all of this, Sergeant Beckford was in the recreation area, having only recently reported for duty. He first became aware of something untoward happening when he saw District Constable Johnson and District Constable Stennett come running into the recreation area from the direction of the cell block, and heard one or both of them saying that ‘prisoners were escaping’. Sergeant Beckford then went up the passage leading to the cell block, when he saw the appellant running towards him. This is his account of what then ensued:

‘A. I rushed to the accused and grabbed onto him and hold him.

Q. How long you grabbed the accused for?

A. I grabbed the accused for about half a minute.

Q. When you saw the accused, he had anything in his hands?

Q. No, when I saw the accused, he had both hands to his sides.

A. What next happened?

Q. From the corner of my eyes, I recall seeing DC Dough coming towards us.

Q. Who is the us?

A. Me and the accused. At that time the accused broke free and ran back to the cells.’

7 Sergeant Beckford then resumed walking towards the cell block, accompanied by District Constable Dough, when, feeling his left side wet, he looked down and realised that his entire left side was covered with blood. It was only then that he appreciated that he had been cut and that there was blood rushing from a wound in the vicinity of his left breast. When he pulled open his shirt and put his hand to his left breast, his finger ‘went down in a hole’. It was not clear to him how he had received this wound, but he surmised that it could only have happened when he was struggling with the appellant, as the appellant was the only person with whom he had come into contact. The appellant had been known to Sergeant Beckford for about five years before this incident and could have been in custody at the station for about a month before, during which period he had seen him, he said, ‘every day that I went to the station’. Immediately upon becoming aware that he was hurt, Sergeant Beckford exclaimed to District Constable Dough, ‘Look how Yam kill me’, “Yam” being, he told the court, ‘the name that people call [the appellant]’. The area in which they had struggled together was well illuminated by fluorescent lighting, which Sergeant Beckford described as ‘very good’.

8 Among the things put to Sergeant Beckford in cross examination was that he had encountered and been attacked by ‘a number of the prisoners who were trying to escape from the police station that night’. Sergeant Beckford disagreed with this suggestion and insisted that the appellant was the only prisoner seen by him in the passageway as he approached the cell block.

9 District Constable Stennett also confirmed much of what Sergeant Beckford had told the court, stating that after he ran back to the recreation area, he had looked back in the direction of the cell block and had seen the appellant and Sergeant Beckford ‘wrestling arm in arm, up, both of them arms up’, until Sergeant Beckford managed to push the appellant ‘back in the passage, out of my sight’. He had Sergeant Beckford and the appellant in his sight at this time for about six seconds. His impression was that the appellant was attempting to escape and that Sergeant Beckford was trying to prevent him from doing so. He saw when Sergeant Beckford, having freed himself of the appellant, came back towards the recreation room, holding his chest and heard him say ‘Jam stab me’. “Jam” was, he testified, an alias which he knew to be the appellant's.

10 Sergeant Beckford was in due course taken to the Port Maria Hospital and then transferred after a couple hours to the St Ann's Bay Hospital, where he was to remain for close to two months. He had sustained a deep puncture wound to the chest wall that had entered the chest cavity, causing significant bleeding within the chest cavity as a result of damage to a blood vessel to the left lung and necessitating emergency surgery. Dr Peter Glegg, who gave evidence for the Crown, told the court that he had never before encountered a case of a person ‘spontaneously bleeding from the lung’, and his opinion was that these injuries would have been caused by a sharp, pointed instrument used with a great degree of force. As a result of his injuries, Sergeant Beckford had a ‘long complicated hospital stay’ and up to the time of the trial his treatment was still ongoing. In Dr Glegg's opinion, these injuries would cause permanent damage to the affected lung and tissue.

11 Sergeant Walworth Duncan also gave evidence for the Crown. Regrettably, no record of his examination in chief is to be found in the official transcript of the evidence at trial. However, his evidence was summarised by the trial judge in his summation to the jury as follows. Sergeant Duncan was the investigating officer, who was summoned to the station, having been given certain information, sometime after 7:30 p.m. on 30 May 2005. At the station, Sergeant Duncan spoke to the appellant (‘O/C Yam’) and accused him of stabbing Sergeant Beckford who was in the process of preventing him from escaping custody, to which the appellant made no response. As a result of other information which he received at the station, Sergeant Duncan went into a female bathroom on the premises where he found a sharp instrument, some four inches long and about quarter of an inch in thickness, wrapped up with cloth and concealed behind a curtain. One end of this instrument, which resembled a blade, was sharpened and Sergeant Beckford observed blood stains on it. He returned to the cell block and showed this instrument to the appellant, telling him that he believed that ‘this was the object that is [sic] used to stab Sergeant Beckford’, to which the appellant again made no response. (This instrument was...