R v King et Al
| Jurisdiction | Caribbean States |
| Judge | Hallinan, C.J.,Rennie, J.,Marnan, J. |
| Judgment Date | 01 January 1960 |
| Date | 01 January 1960 |
| Court | Federal Supreme Court (West Indies) |
Federal Supreme Court
Hallinan, C.J.; Rennie, J.; Marnan, J.
Mr. G.B. Niles for the appellant King.
Mr. E. Carmichael and Mr. H. Forde for the appellant Yarde.
Mr. CA. Burton, Q.C., Attorney-General, and W.D. Malone, Solicitor-General, for the Crown.
Local Government
At the conclusion of the hearing of this appeal, the court quashed the convictions and ordered a new trial and intimated that reasons for its decision would be given later.
The appellants were jointly tried for the murder of Ernest Peterkin between December 20 and 21, 1959, and both were convicted. The trial lasted twenty-one days, part of which was occupied with long arguments as to admissibility of statements made by the appellants to the police, and with long addresses by counsel. The circumstances were sensational. Having regard to the length of the trial, and the emotions it engendered and the welter of argument, it was important that the judge's summing-up should not only clearly direct the jury on matters of law, but assist them by an impartial summary of the evidence so as to refresh their memories and relate the evidence to the issues of fact and law. In R. v. Cohen and Bateman, Channell, J., said (1909) 2 Cr. App. Rep.197 at p. 208):
“In our view, a judge is not only entitled but ought to give the jury some assistance on questions of fact as well as questions of law. Of course, questions of fact are for the jury and not for the judge, yet the judge has experience on the bearing of evidence, and in dealing with the relevancy of questions of fact, and it is therefore right that the jury should have the assistance of the judge.”
The appellant, King, is a mature woman of thirty-seven, of European descent with two children. She had gone to live with Peterkin, an elderly man of some substance, almost blind. Mrs. King, at the same time, had as her lover the other appellant, Yarde, a youth of twenty of African descent.
Peterkin, on a Sunday morning, December 20, 1959, found Yarde with King in a bedroom in his house. Yarde fled and Peterkin quarrelled the whole day with King about this. The Crown led evidence that Peterkin had in his will left a house to King, that, because of King's behaviour with Yarde, he wanted to go to a lawyer to revoke the benefit to King, and that King knew this and wished to stop it. In the early morning of Monday, December 21, 1959, King roused the neighbours with a report that masked men had raided Peterkin's house and had hit him in the neck with a piece of iron. The medical evidence established that this blow, together with others, had caused dislocation of the spinal cord and contusions and lacerations of the brain resulting in death. King repeated this story to the police, but later made a statement to the police in the early hours of December 22, 1959, which was admitted in evidence after much argument. This was a long and detailed statement.
On Thursday, December 24, 1959, the witness, Dash, said he had a conversation with her. She said that Peterkin was love-making roughly (their relations were apparently improved) when Yarde entered the bedroom and hit Peterkin with a ripping iron. She said, “What you lick him down for?”, then, not knowing what to do, she cut Peterkin's throat with the kitchen knife. The doctor's evidence is that when the throat wounds were inflicted, the deceased was either deeply unconscious or dead. King also made a statement from the dock at the trial. This also was a detailed statement and had to be carefully compared with her story of the masked men, her statement to the police, and Dash's account of what she said. Yarde gave a statement to the police on December 30, 1959, but made no statement from the dock. Of course, King's statements are no evidence against him, nor is his statement evidence against her, unless any such statement was made in pursuance of a preconceived criminal design. He said that it was King who struck Peterkin with a crow-bar. He said she then gave it to him and told him to break the “below door” for her and he did so.
These facts do not purport to be a summary of the evidence. This court has already ordered a new trial in this case and it is neither desirable nor necessary that we should review the evidence in detail. But the facts stated above are a necessary background to our criticism of the summing-up of the learned trial judge.
The summing-up occupies sixty-five pages of the record. The first eleven pages contain directions on law to which no objection has been taken. The judge then addressed the jury as follows:
“I do not desire at this stage to go through all the evidence that has been given, because it has been a long trial and you have heard each of the defence counsel and the counsel for the prosecution deal with it. And they have dealt with it well. All of them. The witnesses have been thoroughly cross-examined and I think you will know what the evidence is, but there is the evidence of one witness which I think is of importance, and therefore I think I will read to you what I think should be read, and that is the evidence of Dr. Ward.”
The next eight pages contain a careful analysis of the doctor's...
To continue reading
Request your trial