Unity wedding house murder: CoA to rule on appeal against 70-year jail sentence on Wednesday

Forty-one-year-old Rajesh Guyadeen, who had mounted an appeal against his conviction and 70-year jail sentence for the 2003 murder of Nandram Manohar, will know his fate on Wednesday when the Court of Appeal (CoA) of Guyana delivers its ruling.

Following a trial before Demerara High Court Judge Navindra Singh in 2018, Guyadeen called “Bricksman” was found guilty of the capital offence by a mixed 12-member jury and a lengthy jail sentence was imposed on him. Through Attorney-at-Law Brandon De Santos, the murder convict filed an appeal against his conviction and sentence.
He, among other things, had argued that the trial admitted prejudicial evidence, and this, coupled with the misdirection the Judge gave to the jury, rendered his conviction unsafe. As such, he had asked the appellate court to quash his conviction.

At the appeal hearing in April, Guyadeen’s lawyer had advanced that the trial Judge admitted prejudicial evidence. For context, he had submitted that during the trial proceedings, Prosecutrix Abigail Gibbs told the jury that his client “run, run, run”.
According to counsel, in her closing address to the jury, the prosecutor, among other things, had said that Guyadeen had fled to neighbouring Suriname after committing the crime and was only arrested some 11 years after.
De Santos had contended that whether this is true or not, it is of little importance in terms of proving the elements of murder. According to the defence counsel, the prosecutrix’s assertion is prejudicial because it “would invite the jury to draw the conclusion that the reason he was running was to get away from any liability he ought to have faced”.
“When you say he ‘run, run, run’, as a prosecutor you may have fallen into an error of giving the jury a misconception that he ran away to escape”, said De Santos as he maintained that his client did not run away.
The defence lawyer had said that other inferences could have been drawn from his client’s absence from the jurisdiction. Where other inferences can be drawn from the evidence, De Santos had reasoned that as a matter of law, the inference most favourable to the accused person must be drawn. While this evidence was prejudicial, he had said, “It may have some probative value.
When one was to examine what the probative value was, about him running away, it does little, if anything, to establish the ingredients necessary for a murder charge.
“It may have established the reason why it took so long for the charge to have been brought and for the trial to have commenced. But that is not relevant…in a murder trial you need to have the ingredients for the murder charge led… and this running away aspect, in my respectful submission, did little, or anything, in terms of proving the elements of the charge of murder.”
For her part, Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Teshana James-Lake had dismissed De Santos’s contention that the trial Judge did not fairly/adequately put his client’s defence of alibi to the jury.
She had recounted that when called upon to lead a defence, Guyadeen had opted to give sworn testimony and called witnesses to support his alibi that he was not in the country at the time of the commissioning of the offence.
In putting Guyadeen’s defence to the jurors, the prosecutor had recalled that the Judge indicated to them that this was a defence of alibi. Apart from summarising Guyadeen’s defence of him being in Suriname at the time of the incident, the prosecutor had said that Justice Singh also analysed the evidence of the two witnesses he called in support of his case.
Considering this, the Assistant DPP had insisted that Guyadeen’s defence was extensively put to the jury by the trial Judge. “Equal treatment was given to the prosecution’s case and the defence’s case,” she had argued.
According to her, the trial Judge was “very clear” in his general directions that it was the prosecution that had the burden to prove the elements of the offence.
“The jury would have been clear because we had two cases that were completely opposite: the prosecution was saying that this is the appellant (Guyadeen) that caused the injuries… caused the death… and there we had the defence indicating that no we did not cause the injuries, the appellant was not there on the night.”
To this end, James-Lake had argued that taking the summing up as a whole, the trial Judge dealt adequately with the treatment of the evidence, including the defence of Guyadeen “so that the conviction in this matter ought to remain”.
This appeal had been heard by Chancellor of the Judiciary (ag) Justice Yonette Cummings-Edwards and Justices of Appeal Dawn Gregory-Barnes and Rishi Persaud, who had thereafter indicated that the court would reserve its decision for a later date.
Reports state that on the night of May 4, 2003, at Unity, Lancaster, Mahaica, East Coast Demerara (ECD), Guyadeen and 26-year-old Manohar were at a wedding house when someone alleged that Manohar punctured Guyadeen’s bicycle wheel.
Shortly after, Manohar, called “Nando” was reportedly heard crying out that he had been stabbed.
The injured man was pronounced dead on arrival at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC). His cause of death was given as perforation of the aorta and kidney as a result of a stab wound measuring some 16 centimetres in length.
According to reports, Guyadeen, who had been the prime suspect in the man’s murder, fled the country and had been reportedly hiding out in Suriname.
He reportedly returned to Guyana in December 2013 and was apprehended two months later when Police ranks raided a hotspot where they found him smoking marijuana.