Woman freed of killing lover

Alicia Marsha Chunu, 30, of Rich Plain Road, Diego Martin, was before Volney in the Port-of-Spain First Criminal Court charged with murdering her married lover Menon Hingoo between May 21 and 22, 2002 at Alice Point in Chaguaramas.

It was alleged Chunu bashed in Hingoo’s head, dumped his body in the Gulf of Paria and left his car dangling over the edge of a cliff. Attorney Ravi Rajcoomar represented Chunu while State attorney Debbie Ann Bassaw prosecuted.

At the close of the prosecution’s case, Rajcoomar made a no-case submission and the State conceded that it could not answer the submission. When hearing resumed yesterday, Volney said it was a “sad day” for the administration of criminal justice. He said justice had not prevailed for either the accused or deceased.

“The court, as the engine for delivery of social justice, bleeds from what has in this case been a travesty of justice,” Volney said.

Volney said Chunu spent the last four years behind bars on testimony which “at its highest offered an inept investigation only a modicum to suspect Chunu of a weak motive for killing her lover.” He said it was an investigation which was closed before it even started.

“For the lack of open-mindedness and balance from the outset of the investigation, the accused, four years later, is to be discharged from custody with a spectre of suspicion following her in the shadows. A case that ought still to be open but was closed may never be reopened and whoever is liable to face retribution of the law will roam the streets unpunished.”

Volney said if the resources of the State had been properly directed, the accused would have been offered the protection of the law. Instead, he said, she was hunted down on the questionable basis of her last being seen with Hingoo and then the deliberate abuse of power by a police inspector who acted both “whimsically and arbitrarily” by illegally engineering a confrontation.

“The young woman did not have at her disposal the wherewithal to challenge the mighty State and its organs, by pre-emptively casting upon her accusers at the very earliest opportunity, the justification in law and fact for the charge preferred against her. She suffered the fate of the poor in the face of an ill-advised prosecution.”

Volney said he could not understand why the police inspector could not find eight East Indian women in Patna Village, Diego Martin to go on the identification parade. “Why did he not go to West Mall and find these women? He could have moved to Couva or Chaguanas Police Stations and invited eight East Indian women to go on the identification parade,” the judge slammed.

According to Volney, he did not allow the evidence of the ID parade and that is where the prosecution’s case fell apart.

Volney then turned his attention on those who attack judges. “I am alarmed at the effrontery of those who should know better...who rather than engineer and facilitate a constructive revolution in the way of dispensation of criminal justice, attack its judges with unbridled and crude ferocity.”

He said if social justice is to be delivered with a respect for the rule of law, then those who deliver it must do so without fear or favour.