Jail term starts on date of conviction

The Law Lords laid down the rule in a written judgment delivered on Wednesday in the Trinidad and Tobago case of Kumar Ali and Leslie Tiwari versus the State.

The judgment was delivered by the Board comprising Lords Bingham, Steyn, Rodger, Carswell, and Baroness Hale.

According to Lord Carswell, the appeals before the Board raised in a rather extreme form the issue of how appellate courts should determine the date from which an unsuccessful appellant’s sentence should run.

This issue has been an issue of contention over the years as local courts have ordered sentences to start from the date on which the appeal was dismissed. But the Privy Council on Wednesday ended that theory, ruling that the sentence should start from the date of conviction. Tiwari was convicted on April 12, 1989, after a trial before Justice Aeneas Wills on counts of rape, two charges of robbery and arson. He was unrepresented at the trial. The judge sentenced him to 30 years and 20 strokes with the whip for rape, ten years for robbery to follow the 30 years, and life imprisonment for arson to follow.

Tiwari appealed, but the appeal was not heard until July 1995. Judgment was not delivered until October 31, 1996 when the appeal was dismissed. The Court of Appeal, comprising then Chief Justice Michael de la Bastide, present Chief Justice Sat Sharma, and Justice Lloyd Gopeesingh (now deceased), ruled that Tiwari’s sentence should run from the date on which the judgment was reserved.

Tiwari then appealed to the Privy Council. The British-based court remitted the case to the TT Court of Appeal to reconsider the matter. The Court of Appeal comprising Justices Rolston Nelson, Anthony Lucky, and Wendell Kangaloo adjudicated on the matter and ruled that Tiwari’s sentence should start on October 31, 1996.

The Board found Ali’s case simpler. He was convicted on November 14, 1991, for robbery before Justice Conrad Douglin (now deceased) and sentenced to 11 years in jail.

He filed an appeal which was not heard until February 9, 1996. The appeal was dismissed and the court ordered his sentence to start from that date. The effect of the order of the Court of Appeal was that the sentence which Ali had to serve was increased from 11 years to 15 years and three months, which exceeded the maximum for such an offence.

He remained in custody from the date of his conviction on November 14, 1991, to June 6, 2003, when he was granted parole. He served 11 years and seven months in prison, a period exceeding the original sentence.

In their 12-page judgment, the Law Lords concluded that the TT Court of Appeal ought to have directed that in the case of Ali and Tiwari, that the full period of time spent between conviction and the disposition of the appeal should count towards their sentences.