Appeal Court quashes conviction after 10 years

The Court of Appeal noted yesterday that a pivotal embellishment by a police inspector to his evidence under cross-examination seriously damaged his credibility and that his testimony must have been rejected as untruthful. The court made this observation when it allowed the appeal of  Wayne Rodriguez, the managing director of Moonrise Development Company Limited, in a ten-page judgment yesterday. Rodriguez  won his appeal against a conviction of  uttering a false document. Upon conviction he was ordered to pay a fine of $1,000 or serve three months hard labour.

Justice Roger Hamel-Smith and Justice Ivor Archie, allowed Rodriguez’s appeal which was argued by attorneys Israel Khan SC and Keith Scotland. His conviction was quashed and sentence set aside. The judges,  noting that some ten years have elapsed since the commission of the offence and four years since conviction, said they did not think the interest of justice required Rodriguez to be subjected to a retrial. The facts of the case are that Rodriguez was engaged in a townhouse development. To obtain completion certificate from the Diego Martin Regional Corporation, the developer had to satisfy the corporation that smoke detectors and extinguishers would be installed. It was the practice of the building inspector, on occasions, to accept a written undertaking from the prospective openers in this type of development that the requisite equipment would be installed before commencing occupation.

In October 1994, Rodriguez had a meeting with a building inspector. The procedures were discussed with him. One week later Rodriguez submitted a letter on Moonrise letterhead, confirming that the equipment would be installed in three of the apartments. The letter was purported to be signed by the respective owners. Two of the openers testified that those signatures were forged. Rodriguez was charged by Insp Thomas Nimblett. Rodriguez admitted writing the body of the letter, but said he left it with his secretary to have the owners sign. Following the incident the secretary was no longer employed with the company and Rodriguez did not know where she could be found. The expert document examiner formed no conclusion as to whether the signatures had been executed by Rodriguez. The magistrate found Rodriguez not guilty on the charge of forgery.

The Court of Appeal noted that the magistrate’s finding was an acceptance that Rodriguez did not execute the forged signatures. The remaining issue was whether Rodriguez knew the signatures were forged when he presented the letter. Their lordships noticed a significant embellishment to the testimony of Nimblett in cross-examination, which without, there was no direct evidence to establish that Rodriguez knew the signatures were forgeries. But this evidence was rejected as untruthful, and the Court observed “the inspector’s credibility was therefore seriously damaged once that additional evidence was rejected. The weight of all his evidence including the ‘equivocal’ admission would have been diminished, once Nimblett’s  additional evidence was rejected.” The two main grounds of appeal filed by Khan were whether the findings of fact upon which the magistrate based her decision were supported by the evidence; and the effect of the magistrate’s failure to deal with the issue of the good character of Rodriguez.