Kirsty Brimelow QC and Graeme Hall to appear before the Privy Council

On 15 and 16 February 2022, Kirsty Brimelow QC and Graeme Hall appear before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in an important constitutional and criminal appeal against the conviction of Mr Lescene Edwards for murder.

On the morning of 5 September 2003, Mr Edwards visited his partner and the wife of his children at her home in Jamaica. The Prosecution case is that Mr Edwards took the deceased into the bathroom, shot her, and staged a suicide; including the writing of a false suicide note.

The defence maintain that the deceased took her own life.

Mr Edwards was convicted over 10 years later, in 2013. He was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment. On 1 July 2019, the Court of Appeal of Jamaica dismissed Mr Edwards’s appeal against conviction but reduced the sentence to 20 years’ imprisonment.

The Privy Council is to consider whether the extensive pre-trial and appeal delay breached Mr Edwards’s constitutional right to a trial within a reasonable time; and, if so, what (if any) remedy ought to be granted.

The Privy Council has also granted leave on 6 grounds pertaining to the safety of Mr Edwards’s conviction. In broad summary, the defence maintain that Mr Edwards’s conviction is based on a miscarriage of justice as inter alia the police investigation was wholly deficient (including the cleaning of the scene by a relative of the deceased within a matter of hours of the deceased’s death); that important evidence – such as Mr Edwards’s clothes, gun and holster – were not sent for forensic testing; that important evidence secured by the police – such as the deceased’s clothing – was destroyed by the police in 2009; and that the evidence of the Prosecution’s handwriting expert was so compromised as to be worthless given that Mr Edwards was provided with the note when his handwriting sample was taken.

The defence also seeks leave to rely on fresh evidence from experts in gunshot residue, blood spatter and ballistics in support of Mr Edwards’s appeal.

Kirsty and Graeme appear pro bono, and have been instructed in Mr Edwards’s case since 2019 by Saul Lehrfreund of the Death Penalty Project.