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Official Transcripts (1990-1997)*

Taibo v R
[1996] Lexis Citation 2224

(Transcript)

PRIVY COUNCIL

LORDS, KEITH OF KINKEL, BROWNE-WILKINSON, MUSTILL, STEYN, SIR BRIAN HUTTON

22 JANUARY 1996, 26 MARCH 1996

26 MARCH 1996

On appeal from the Court of Appeal of Belize

M Grieve, A Metzer and J Knowles for the Appellant; J Dinjemans for the Respondents

Simons Muirhead & Burton; Edwin Coe

LORD MUSTILL

(reading the judgment of the court): During the morning of Wednesday, 14 August 1991 the body of Jill
Oborne ("the deceased") was discovered at the house in the outskirts of Dangriga in Belize where she had
been living with Albert Valerio. She had been murdered, the cause of death being a massive wound to the
throat, and her clothing was disarranged in a manner suggesting a sexual assault. The house had been ran-
sacked and some small items of jewellery were missing. At first, Albert Valerio was suspected of the murder
and detained, but it soon became clear that he could not have been responsible. Some days later, Ellis Taibo
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was arrested and charged with the murder. At the conclusion of a trial during July 1992 he was found guilty
and sentenced to death. After an unsuccessful appeal to the Court of Appeal of Belize, he brings this further
appeal by special leave.

Although several grounds of appeal have been advanced, two are by far the most important. First, that the
evidence for the prosecution fell short of a prima facie case, so that the trial judge should have di-
rected an acquittal. Secondly, that even if there was just enough to go to the jury particular care
should have been, but in the event was not, taken in the summing-up to point out the various weak-
nesses in the evidence for the prosecution. The scope of the issues need only be stated in this way to
show that the appeal is of a kind which the Board will not usually entertain and that the nature of the com-
plaints calls for a more detailed examination of the evidence than would normally be appropriate.

I The Case for the Prosecution.

It is useful to begin by setting out the opening statement of counsel for the prosecution as recorded in the
note of the trial judge.

"Mr. Foreman and members of the jury as the Registrar rightly read to you the accused has been charged
with the crime of murder. I will give you brief facts of the case prosecution hopes to prove. On the 14th Au-
gust 1991 sometime after 10 in the morning Jill Oborne was found dead in a house at No. 21 Howard Street,
Southern Foreshore, here in Dangriga.

She has been found with a slash on the neck - 5 ins. in length - a knife with what appear to be blood was
found very near this body. Police came in to investigate - body taken to Belize City mortuary where body was
identified by former VSO Director Elizabeth Fish.

Ellis Taibo had come to Dangriga the day before about 7 o'clock had return back after 8 the following day.
When he came to Dangriga was seen wearing a red shirt which was identified as found not far from the
house where the lady was killed. On returning back was found wearing a greenish shirt which was identified
as belonging to this lady.

On this evidence the Crown is relying to prove that this lady is dead and on this evidence we are saying that
it was Ellis Taibo who intentionally caused the death of Jill Oborne. Our case is being prosecuted relying on
circumstantial evidence there is no direct evidence."

Thus, counsel for the prosecution very fairly acknowledged from the outset that there was none of the direct
evidence against the appellant which often founds a prosecution for murder. No witness spoke to having
seen the appellant in the vicinity of the house on the night of the murder. The knife which inflicted the fatal
wound was not said to have belonged to the appellant or to have been seen in his possession. Finger-print
impressions were sought, but there were none to connect the appellant with the scene of the crime. Bodily
samples were taken from the deceased and the appellant, but they were inconclusive. So also were tests on
the crucial items of clothing. The missing jewellery was not traced to the appellant. In statements taken by
the police the appellant made no admissions of any kind.

Counsel's opening address clearly shows that the case for the prosecution was initially founded on evidence
and inferences about two items of clothing: a "red shirt" and "greenish shirt": initially, because the case was
to be reinforced at the last moment by another important item of evidence, given by a man named Francisco
Valerio. The expressions "red shirt" and "greenish shirt" have been placed in quotation marks for two rea-
sons. Not one but two, and conceivably three, red shirts were described in evidence, and according to differ-
ent accounts there may have been two green shirts (or two shirts of a greenish blue colour). Moreover, the
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word "shirt" was used at the trial to denote two different styles of garment: a shirt with a collar, and a collar-
less T-shirt.

II. Chronology: Undisputed Facts.

The order of events is important.

(i) On 8 August 1991 Albert Valerio left the house at 21 Howard Street to go camping with his Scout troop.
The deceased remained at Dangriga.

(ii) For a few months before Tuesday, 13 August the appellant had been living with Jane Cruz in Seine
Beight, a village of about one thousand inhabitants. On that day they quarrelled, and the appellant left her
house. During the evening he set off in the direction of Dangriga. He was wearing mauve shorts.

(iii) The deceased was murdered in the early hours of Wednesday, 14 August. Her body was discovered at
about 10.00 am., and a detachment of police under the command of Sergeant E Itza was summoned. Upon
arrival they found that the clothing of the deceased was disarranged, and that her face was covered with T-
shirts and a sheet. There was blood on the fabrics and there was a big blood spot (or pool) on the floor.
Drawers in the bedroom had been pulled open and there was an empty purse on the bed. A knife with what
appeared to be bloodstains was found in an adjacent room.

Sgt. Itza immediately set his men to searching the neighbourhood, and one of them (PC Arzu) found a red
"shirt" (or a T-shirt) by the roadside about 100 yards or feet from the house.

During the afternoon, Albert Valerio was arrested up-country and detained overnight.

Finally, the appellant arrived in Seine Beight and went to the house of Rita Maxima. He was observed by
Jane Cruz from her kitchen window.

(iv) On Thursday, 15 August the police took Albert Valerio to Dangriga, where there was an important inter-
view at which he was shown some coloured T-shirts.

(v) On the morning of the following day, Friday, 16 August, Constable Guzman and Sgt. Itza went to Seine
Beight. According to their evidence they searched the house of one Martin Valerio, and found two pairs of
shorts, one of them mauve, and a light green "sport shirt". Nobody else was present. The house was un-
locked. Later they found the appellant working on the house of Joseph Augustine, and arrested him.

(vi) On 20 August, the appellant made a statement under caution in which he explained that he was friends
with Albert Valerio, and had three times visited the house where Valerio lived with the deceased. The most
recent was on the evening of Sunday, 11 August. When he visited Dangriga again on Tuesday, 13 August, he
did not go to the house, but after passing the evening in the town spent the night in a partly completed build-
ing and then hitch-hiked back to Seine Beight. He was wearing light mauve shorts and a greenish colour
shirt.

(vii) During August 1991 the body of the deceased was brought back to England. A post-mortem was carried
out. The results are not in evidence.
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(viii) At some time before December 1991 a senior officer of the Belize police took a number of exhibits to the
United Kingdom for examination by the Forensic Scientific Laboratory for DNA and other tests. These in-
cluded swabs, blood samples and clothing. According to the evidence of Detective Inspector Robinson, an
officer from the Hampshire Police seconded to assist the Belize police, the clothing included the red shirt
found by PC Arzu, a red T-shirt with the label Memo, possibly another red T-shirt, a light blue T-shirt (perhaps
a T-shirt elsewhere described as green), and a pair of mauve shorts. All the exhibits were brought back to
Belize for the trial, except for the semen and blood samples which (according to the Inspector) "proved noth-
ing".

III. The Red Shirt.

In his opening address counsel for the prosecution asserted that: "When he [the appellant] came to Dangriga
was seen wearing a red shirt which was identified as found not far from the house where the lady was killed".
This must be a reference to the shirt found by PC Arzu on the road not far from the house. There was a con-
flict of evidence between Arzu and Sgt. Itza about whether Arzu had been instructed to look for a red T-shirt.
The former said that he had, the latter that he had not. There was also uncertainty about whether PC Arzu
had identified the garment as a shirt or a T-shirt. At all events when the trial arrived PC Arzu identified a gar-
ment Exhibit A as the shirt which he had found; but he did so only "by the shade of the colour".

Another witness spoke to Exhibit A, namely Jane Cruz. She said that she had bought a red shirt, marked with
a fox in the front and a manufacturer's label "J.C. Penny" at the neck. When shown Exhibit A she said that it
resembled the shirt which she had given to the appellant. JC Penny is the name of an American manufac-
turer whose products are sold in very large quantities world-wide.

Plainly, the prosecution was inviting the jury to find that the appellant had worn the red shirt which PC Arzu
found when he committed the offence, and had then discarded it when running away, presumably because it
bore marks of the crime. Unfortunately the pathologist who gave evidence of the post-mortem in Belize was
not asked to say whether the infliction of this large throat wound would have projected blood towards the at-
tacker, and the pathologist who conducted the post mortem in England did not give evidence. The purpose of
sending the shirt to England for examination must have been to see whether it bore stains of blood, and par-
ticularly blood of the deceased. The nil return suggests that there may have been none of significance, in
which case it is hard to see why the perpetrator should have thrown the shirt away.

There was another red garment, a T-shirt not a "shirt", which according to the evidence of Albert Valerio he
had been shown during his interview on 15 August (the day after the murder). It had then borne stains re-
sembling blood, and resembled one which he had seen at No. 21 Howard Street. This was one of the gar-
ments sent to England for examination. According to Inspector Robinson it carried the label MEMO. Whether
this was the same shirt as the one which was shown to the deceased's daughter and Albert Valerio at the
trial, and stated to resemble one owned by the deceased is not clear; there is no reference in the notes of ev-
idence to the shirt being bloodstained. This need not be pursued, for it is clear that a collarless T-shirt can
have no relevance to the prosecution's case that the appellant was wearing a JC Penny shirt when he left for
Seine Beight and was not wearing it when he came back. What did matter, for the purpose of explaining the
case to the jury, was that: (i) PC Arzu identified the shirt Exhibit A only by its colour. (ii) He did not say that
there were blood-stains on it. (iii) There were marks resembling blood on the red T-shirt found under the
head of the deceased, but this was not the shirt which the appellant was said to have been wearing when he
left Seine Beight on the evening before the murder. (iv) Both shirts were sent for examination in England but
no positive result was reported.

IV. The Green Shirt.

The case for the prosecution was stated in opening as follows: "On returning back [to Seine Beight from Dan-
griga] was found wearing a greenish shirt which was identified as belonging to this lady". Although it was not
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explained by the prosecution at the trial just how this shirt was said to be relevant, no doubt the jury was
asked to infer that the appellant, having committed a murder which involved bloodshed, and fearing that his
clothing bore traces of it, took a green shirt from the deceased's house and put it on after he had thrown
away his red JC Penny shirt. Evidently no such precaution was needed as regards the mauve shorts which
he was undoubtedly still wearing when he returned to Seine Beight on Wednesday, 14 August. Since the
green shirt was plainly crucial to the case as opened to the jury by the prosecutor, the evidence about it must
be examined in detail.

In order of time, the evidence relates first to an occasion when the deceased was on holiday in England dur-
ing July 1991 and went shopping with her daughter in Chichester. According to the daughter:-

"She bought mainly T-shirts among other clothing. They were MEMO brand T-shirts which appear on the la-
bel on the back. She bought about 4 ... they were all MEMO brand T-shirts. There was one sort of red in
colour; 1 which was a light blue-green in colour; and that's all I can remember".

At the trial the daughter was shown a red and a greenish blue T-shirt, and said that they were like the ones
her mother had bought. Evidence was also called from the Sales Manager of MEMO fashions. He stated that
their goods were sold only in Europe. There were about nine colours of the type of shirt in question, including
red, turquoise blue and green. The witness produced examples of the turquoise blue and green T-shirts. On
being shown the garments which had been produced to the daughter he identified them as having been man-
ufactured by his company.

Turning to the evidence of a particular green or blue or greenish-blue T-shirt, the first event in order of time
was described by Jane Cruz. This young woman said that during the morning of the day after her quarrel
with the appellant (ie. the morning after the murder) she had observed his arrival at Seine Beight in a pick-up
truck. He was 50 yards away. He was wearing a blue shirt and the same mauve shorts as before. He went
into the kitchen of Rita Maxima, and came out shortly afterwards in a brown long-sleeve shirt. She said that
the appellant did not own a blue or green shirt, but she was familiar with the brown long-sleeve shirt. On be-
ing shown a garment with the exhibit number "D.G.3" the witness said that it resembled the blue shirt.
Pressed in cross-examination she accepted that she could not say whether it was the same shirt as the one
which she claimed to have seen the appellant wearing on his return to Seine Beight.

The next event said to have involved such a T-shirt took place during Albert Valerio's interview with the police
on 15 August, when he was still in police custody. His account in evidence was as follows:-

"At the Police Station, Dangriga, the Police showed me some exhibits for me to identify. They were T-shirts,
about 4, blue, green, mauve and pink T-shirts. The green T-shirt had 3 buttons to the front, directly under the
chin. Also that green T-shirt had the scent of a Yardley Lavender perfume that we both used at home; myself
and Jill Oborne. It was dirty. In addition to that the T-shirt was a female T-shirt because for the female T-shirt
the buttons are placed on the left side and for the male it would be on the right. It didn't have any collar. The
brand of the shirt is a MEMO placed in the back of the shirt.

Q. -If this shirt was shown to you would you be able to identify it?

A. -For sure.

Shown Exh D.G.3. This is blue shirt MEMO brand with 3 buttons and made in Bangladesh. This is the shirt
the Police showed to me.
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... Jill Oborne ... had 4 MEMO brands T-shirts. The colours of those 4 were blue, green, mauve and pink. This
shirt Exh. D.G.3 resembles one that Jill Oborne had in the house ..."

Finally, there was the evidence of PC Guzman who had been stationed at Seine Beight for about a month.
According to this witness the appellant, together with Joseph Augustine, was living in the house of Martin Va-
lerio. This was in conflict with the evidence of Jane Cruz to the effect that the appellant had been living with
her until the quarrel on 13 August, and indeed had also said when describing the events of 14 August that he
was living at the house of Rita Maxima. PC Guzman described in his evidence how on Friday, 16 August he
had, on the instructions of Sgt. Itza, searched the house of Martin Valerio, and had found one "sport shirt"
and two pairs of shorts, one of them mauve. The shirt was light green in colour, with three buttons at the front
and a MEMO mark at the back. "The shirt was wet - also it had some red spots". It was dirty. The shorts were
also wet and dirty. PC Guzman brought the items down to Dangriga, apparently on the following day (17 Au-
gust), and they were subsequently produced by him at the trial. The garment was described in the note of ev-
idence as "the blue shirt" and was given the exhibit mark "D.G.3".

V Francisco Valerio.

The trial began on Tuesday, 21 July 1992. By Monday, 27 July the evidence of Sgt. Itza was in progress. At
the close of proceedings that afternoon the prosecutor raised with the court the possibility of calling a further
witness, Francisco Valerio. He had not been a witness before the Magistrate, nor had any notice of additional
evidence been given. The trial judge properly indicated that he would not allow the witness to be called with-
out adequate time being given to the defence. The gist of the evidence to be given was furnished to counsel
for the defence, and on Monday morning the prosecutor formally applied that the evidence should be led.
The judge acceded to the application, and Francisco Valerio gave evidence as follows. Almost at the outset
there was this exchange:-

"DPP: On the 13th of August last year between the hours of 8:30 ...?

MR. SAMPSON: Objection: you are leading this witness.

COURT: Except for the date. Question must not be leading.

DPP: On the 13th August late last year part of the day where were you?"

The witness continued by saying that between 7.30 and 8.00 pm. on that day (that is to say, the evening be-
fore the death of the deceased) he met the appellant. The latter called to him across the street, asking for Al-
bert Valerio. The witness told him that Albert was not in Dangriga. "He further told me he could go and sleep
at Albert's house because he Albert and the deceased are friends". The witness added that the appellant was
wearing a red shirt, a sports shirt with buttons, and light short pants.

That was the sum of the case for the prosecution. After the submission of no case by the appellant had been
rejected he made an unsworn statement from the dock. This was on the lines of the statement which he had
given to the police not long after the murder. He had gone down to Dangriga in the pick-up truck. He had not
spoken to Francisco Valerio. After spending some time in Dangriga he rested in an uncompleted house. On
the following morning he took a series of lifts back to Seine Beight, where he went to work on a building. No
evidence was called for the defence.

VI Subsidiary Complaints.
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Before considering the two principal grounds of appeal it is convenient to deal with certain other grounds.
The first relates to the explanations given by the judge in his direction to the jury as to the burden of proof. In
the opinion of the Board there is no substance in this complaint. The relevant passages might perhaps have
been clearer, but taking the direction as a whole the jury can have been left in no doubt that it was for the
prosecution to satisfy them of guilt so that they were sure beyond reasonable doubt.

The second complaint does have substance. The start of the examination-in-chief of Francisco Valerio has
already been quoted. The dates must be recalled. In his statement under caution the appellant had spoken of
a visit to the house of Albert Valerio on the evening of 11 August. He also accepted that he had been in Dan-
griga on Tuesday, 13 August, the evening before the murder, but denied that he had been to Albert Valerio's
house, or had spoken that evening to Francisco Valerio. Plainly, in the evidence of the latter that when he
met the appellant the latter was asking for Albert Valerio the date was crucial: whether the meeting occurred
a few hours before the murder, or two days previously. Yet prosecuting counsel began by leading the witness
on the date. This should not have happened, and the appellant has a justifiable complaint, but it is of no great
weight, for it would have taken only a little more thought for the witness to be taken into a sequence of ques-
tions which would undoubtedly have brought the date into view. It is unrealistic to suppose that the substance
of the evidence was altered by the fact that the question was wrongly expressed.

The third and final complaint is much the strongest. There was no dispute that Albert Valerio and the appel-
lant knew each other, and each side relied on this fact; the prosecution because it was consistent with the ev-
idence of Francisco Valerio about what the appellant had said on the evening of 13 August, and the appellant
because it explained why he had been at the house on the Sunday evening. The previous acquaintance
could have been proved by formal admission, or through a short series of questions to Francisco Valerio. In-
stead, counsel first caused Albert Valerio to state "I know Lynham Prison. I got to know the appellant in this
area", and then went on to put in evidence the appellant's written statement under caution where he had said
that: "I got to know Albert from Lynham where I was serving a term. His father was a prison officer there". Un-
der s 51 of the Evidence Code of Belize (c. 75) evidence of the bad character of a defendant may be ad-
duced only if certain conditions are satisfied, which was not the case here. The appellant maintains that this
breach of an important rule was too serious for the judge to deal with (as not infrequently happens) by pass-
ing it over in silence, in the hope that the jury would not notice. It is also said, rightly, that this is not a case
where an appellate court can disregard an apparent irregularity by treating it as a matter within the discretion
of the trial judge, with which the court should not lightly interfere, since there is nothing in the record to sug-
gest that the trial judge had the point in mind at all.

Whilst this is a substantial complaint, which their Lordships take into account when forming their opinion on
the appeal as a whole, it is not in their view sufficient in itself to compromise the verdict. This was a particu-
larly brutal murder, and the bare knowledge that the appellant had previously committed some unknown kind
of crime could not have led the jury to be sure of a verdict about which they might otherwise have been in
doubt.

VII. The Submission of No Case to Answer.

The evidence given at the trial did not measure up to the brief opening address already quoted. The red shirt
found by the roadside, which on the case for the prosecution must have been worn at the time of the murder
and discarded because it bore traces of the murder (for there could have been no other reason), was not on
examination found to bear such traces. Also, it was not "identified", as the prosecution suggested, as the ap-
pellant's shirt since when Jane Cruz was pressed she could say only that it resembled his shirt; and it was a
garment made by a manufacturer with large world-wide sales.

More importantly, the evidence about the green (or blue or turquoise) shirt was seriously flawed. This shirt
was central. If it belonged to the deceased, and if the appellant had it in his possession after the murder,
there were strong grounds for inferring, since he had given no alternative explanation, that he had taken it
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from the house on the night of the murder. But there were problems about both aspects of the argument. The
evidence about where the appellant was living after he left Jane Cruz was unsatisfactory, and it was at least
possible that the shirt had been put in the house of Martin Valerio by someone else.

Much more important was the flaw in the evidence about the ownership of DG3. The confident identification
of this shirt as the one which belonged to the deceased, coupled with the telling detail about the scent of
Yardley's Lavender, must have made a great impression on the jury. Yet the evidence was wrong, for the shirt
subsequently exhibited as DG3 was not brought from Seine Beight to Dangriga until one, or possibly two,
days after Valerio's interview with the police. Either the deceased had two green T-shirts (a proposition which
nobody had advanced) and the police had for some reason and on some occasion obtained the one which
had no connection with the murder and shown it to Valerio; or the latter had muddled the identification with a
later occasion of which he did not speak, in spite of the fact that the first interview took place after he was de-
tained under suspicion of murder, an event which must surely have lodged clearly in his mind.

These were serious weaknesses in the case for the prosecution, but they were not necessarily fatal. The in-
dicators of possible guilt had to be added together. The red shirt was of common manufacture, but its pres-
ence thrown away on the road not far from the scene suggested a connection with the murder, and there was
evidence that the appellant had been wearing a similar shirt not long before the crime. The story of the green
shirt was unsatisfactory, but if the jury accepted that a MEMO green shirt was found in a place lived in by the
appellant obvious questions arose about how a garment sold only in Europe could have found its way to a
small village in Central America; and the jury might not have been impressed by the suggestion that it was
accounted for by the British military presence in Belize. Finally, there was the evidence of Francisco Valerio.
If the jury believed him, the appellant had in mind to spend the night at a house where he was friendly with
the cohabitant of the deceased. All in all, although the case against the appellant was thin, and perhaps very
thin, if the jury found the evidence of Jane Cruz, Guzman and Francisco Valerio to be truthful and reliable
there was material on which a jury could, without irrationality, be satisfied of guilt. This being so, the judge
was not only entitled but required to let the trial proceed: R v Galbraith [1981] 2 All ER 1060, [1981] 1 WLR
1039.

There remains the second major issue. The prosecution case was not only weak but confusing, and confus-
ing in a way which tended to obscure its weakness. As the story unfolded through the evidence of successive
witnesses, it would have been natural for the jury to lose track of the crucial dates, and of the problems with
the identification of the shirts. The careful arguments addressed on this appeal have enabled the evidence,
so far as it went, to be arranged in an orderly manner. But a mistake would be understandable; a mistake of
a kind which, their Lordships must respectfully point out, was made by the Court of Appeal itself in stating
that Albert Valerio had identified "for sure" Exhibit DG3 as the deceased's green T-shirt, whereas Valerio
could not have been shown DG3 on the occasion which he described. The same mistake was made in the
closing address for the Crown, when it was stated that after finding DG3 PC Guzman had taken it to Sgt.
Itza, who had shown it to Valerio on the occasion of inspecting the four T-shirts, which as already seen could
not have happened. The error was compounded when the trial judge quoted verbatim from the opening for
the Crown, which did not correspond with the evidence actually given.

The purpose of their Lordships in emphasising the evidence on DG3 is not to dwell on a mistake which, with-
out the chronological analysis provided to the Board, would be wholly understandable, but to illustrate the
need for the trial judge to explain to the jury why the simple case presented to them by the prosecution might
be open to doubt. After the most careful study their Lordships have concluded that such an explanation can-
not be found in the summing-up actually delivered. Little purpose would be served in going through it line by
line. It must be emphasised at once that there is no question here of the direction being unbalanced, in the
sense of favouring one side to the prejudice of the other. Although there were features of the summing-up, as
there were of the trial, which are open to criticism, that kind of unfairness cannot be suggested here. Nor can
it be said that the judge's account of the evidence was inaccurate. But in a marginal case such as this the ev-
idence needed to be scrutinised, and not simply rehearsed, if a verdict founded on it was to be safe. This did
not happen here, and their Lordships feel bound to conclude that the verdict cannot stand.
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This conclusion makes it unnecessary to discuss a further question, arising from the direction to the jury on
the nature of circumstantial evidence. The learned judge correctly explained in accordance with long-estab-
lished law that a series of facts, none of which in isolation directly connects an accused person with an of-
fence, may nevertheless when taken together justify an inference of guilt. Whilst the task of deciding whether
to draw such an inference is well within the compass of a jury, and is regularly performed at criminal trials,
there can be an element of risk unless the jury has clearly in mind that the facts relied on must really be
facts, and not simply unproved assertions of fact: for otherwise the inference will be built on sand. This is
something which a jury might easily overlook, believing that what must be added together when considering
whether to draw the inference of guilt is the evidence given, rather than such facts if any as are established
by that evidence. In appropriate cases it may be necessary to warn the jury against falling into this trap.

In the present instance this aspect of the matter was not explored in depth before the Board, and since the
appeal has been decided on other grounds their Lordships will not attempt a formulation of the circum-
stances and manner in which the jury should be directed upon it, or whether in this particular instance the
summing-up as delivered gave the necessary guidance.

One question remains, namely what order should now be made. There are obvious objections to a retrial.
Prominent among them are the fact that the case turns upon detailed recollections of events which happened
some years ago, and the long period during which the appellant has been under sentence of death. These
factors may not however be decisive, and their Lordships think it right that the Court of Appeal of Belize
should have an opportunity to decide what course will now best serve the interests of justice. Accordingly
they will humbly advise Her Majesty that the conviction should be set aside and the matter remitted to the
Court of Appeal to consider whether the prosecution should be permitted, if so advised, to proceed to a re-
trial.

Appeal allowed