Cop freed of murder in retrial
Published:Friday | February 5, 2021 | 12:14 AM
Police Corporal Vince Edwards was on Wednesday found not guilty of the 2009 killing of Tyrone Powell in a judge-alone murder retrial in the Home Circuit Court.
The policeman was arrested and charged with murder following an incident in Cooreville Gardens, St Andrew, after he went to the defence of an off-duty special officer, who was being attacked by three men.
The cop shot and killed 17-year-old Powell during a reported exchange of gunfire.
The lawman was found guilty of murder during a jury trial in April 2011 and sentenced to 15 years. But his lawyer, Valerie Neita-Robertson, QC, appealed the verdict. The sentence and conviction were set side and a new trial ordered.
Justice Cresencia Brown-Beckford handed down the not-guilty verdict.
According to the facts presented by prosecutors Adley Duncan and Ashtelle Steele, on August 10, the three men got into an altercation with an unarmed off-duty cop, who ran towards Edwards seeking assistance.
The Crown, which relied on the transcript of witness evidence from the first trial, as the witnesses did not appear, argued that the three men were unarmed and that there was no evidence that any of them had challenged Edwards or shot at the other officer.
The defence, however, argued that Edwards was walking in the community when he saw the men fighting the officer, who ran after one of the men pulled a firearm and started shooting at him.
Neita-Robertson told The Gleaner that her client went to his colleague’s defence and shouted out “Police!” but the man continued to fire, and Edwards fired back at the man who ran back inside a car and was still firing at him.
“So our case is that the man in the back seat firing accidentally shot him [the driver] in all of the melee that was happening, and the car crashed,” Neita-Robertson said.
She further pointed out that a knife was also found in the hand of the driver, which the special officer had mentioned during his testimony.
The Court of Appeal, in overturning Edwards’ guilty verdict, had indicated that an assessment of the defence’s legal arguments showed that the trial judge had made a number of errors in his direction to the jury.
Among them were the treatment of the unsworn statement Edwards gave during his trial and the handling of the defence available to him as a police officer in the lawful execution of his duty.