Prosecutor: Accused confessed to police

On Monday, Justice Prakash Moosai will sum up the Carnival Monday murder trial, in which Rio Claro villager Murray Joseph Forde is on trial in the San Fernando High Court for stabbing housemaid Annette Sawh to death with a sharpened spoon. The jury will retire on Tuesday to deliberate on a verdict. Yesterday, the State addressed the 12-member jury trying Forde for the crime, and Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Joan Honore-Paul reminded the jury that the accused had confessed to killing the woman in a written statement to the police. The murder incident occurred between February 10 and 13, 2002  — Carnival Monday and Ash Wednesday. 

The 12-member jury and two alternates were asked yesterday by Honore-Paul to measure the evidence that was put to them by all the witnesses who were called to the stand, including the police officers and Sawh’s daughter, Nalini Sawh. The prosecutor told the jury that she did not call Sawh’s daughter to the witness stand for pity. “Nalini saw her mother as she left that day. Nalini took out the clothes her mother wore that day — that is how she was able to identify them,” Honore-Paul said. “Those clothes,” the prosecutor added, “were found in a bloody heap away from the body.”

In asking the jurors to focus on the issues which emerged in the trial, Honore-Paul said that in no way could the police officers, the Justice of the Peace and the taxi driver who testified, fabricate a story against the accused. The prosecutor told the jury that Forde even told investigating officers how the event unfolded that Carnival morning. “Every police, according to the Standing Order of Trinidad and Tobago, must have their diaries with them and should write down everything in that diary while they are investigating a matter,” Honore-Paul told the jury. Forde told police, she said, that he used a sharpened spoon to stab Sawh 20 times.