PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jun 11, CMC -A High Court judge says the court has a duty to prevent a trial where the process itself is offensive to justice as she freed four men, including a former soldier of the 2005 murder of real estate agent, Gerald Gopaul.
“This is such a case. The more egregious the State conduct, the greater the need for the court to disassociate itself from it,” Justice Nalini Singh said in a 159 page ruling, adding “to permit this trial to continue would not only be unfair, it would make a mockery of the integrity of the criminal justice system”.
Gopaul, 52, was abducted from the Diamond Recreation Club, Diamond Village, south of here, and his body was found 11 days later in St Augustine, east of here, wrapped in green plastic.
Initially, eight men were on trial when the matter began in February 2020 before Justice Norton Jack and a 12-member jury.
But when jury trials were halted as one of the measures to protect staff and other court users at the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, in March 2020, four of the men pleaded guilty to felony murder.
Their sentencing was held in camera to protect the remaining accused men since their trial was yet to be completed, in preservation of the integrity of the trial.
When the trial resumed in January, Paul Boodoo, Cpl Richardo Stevenson, the ex-special forces soldier, Martin Crichlow and Sherwin Crystom went on trial for Gopaul’s murder.
Ex-soldier Jason Percival, who was originally charged with the others, had turned state’s witness.
But in his ruling Justice Singh ordered the release of the remaining four after finding there was no evidence to support a conviction and that the prosecution’s conduct had irreparably tainted the fairness of the trial.
The judge upheld their no-case submissions and granted permanent stays of proceedings on multiple grounds, including abuse of process, failure to investigate exculpatory evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct.
In 2023, Stevenson pleaded with the authorities to have his trial restarted and maintained he would not plead guilty to crimes he did not commit.
Stevenson and six others were previously charged with kidnapping and murdering United States war veteran Balram “Balo” Maharaj. The charges for the two murders and kidnappings were laid against him in 2006.
In the Maharaj case, five men were extradited to the US to stand trial for kidnapping and murder, as Maharaj was a US citizen.
In her ruling on the no-case submissions and abuse of process applications, Justice Singh said there was no evidential foundation for the charge of murder under either joint enterprise or felony-murder.
“The court concludes that there was no evidence from which a properly directed jury could infer that the accused men intended to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm to the victim, Gerald Gopaul. The evidence demonstrates only that they participated in the initial abduction, but beyond that, there is an evidential void.
“There was no indication that the accused maintained any involvement after the abduction itself…So, what little evidence that existed post-abduction suggests the accused expected the victim to remain alive for ransom negotiations, a fact wholly inconsistent with any murderous intent.
“As such, the court finds that there is no evidential foundation for establishing liability against the four accused under the common law doctrine of joint enterprise murder,” the judge said.
The prosecution had relied on the testimony of Jason Percival, a confessed criminal and accomplice who admitted under oath in prior proceedings to multiple kidnappings and a conspiracy to murder.
Percival was also a former soldier and in his testimony, he claimed to be present during the planning stages and when Gopaul, 52, was snatched from the bar near his home, on July 8, 2005.
But Justice Singh ruled that Percival’s evidence was “so compromised in its quality” that no jury could be safely asked to rely on it.
She said his testimony was riddled with contradictions, material omissions, implausibilities, and admissions of dishonesty, including a stated willingness to lie to avoid life imprisonment.
“This is not merely a matter of evidential weakness,” the judge held. “It is a fundamental issue of fairness and integrity,” the judge said, as she also condemned the state’s reliance on Percival’s testimony.
“Even taken at its highest, Jason Percival’s evidence is so tenuous that no properly directed jury could safely convict upon it.”
She also faulted the prosecutors’ failure to disclose US transcripts detailing his admissions under oath in the Maharaj trial, including a deliberate lie to the FBI in an interview, saying it reflected “a disregard for the prosecutorial duty to ensure that the proceedings are fair not only in outcome but in process.”
“What has occurred in this case reflects a breach of that responsibility. It cannot be overstated that this prosecutorial duty is qualitatively distinct from the jury’s role in assessing credibility. The prosecutor is required to evaluate in advance whether the evidence is sufficiently reliable to justify asking a jury to perform that function at all…
“In this case, the continued reliance on Jason Percival despite his admitted dishonesty, and his outstanding criminal matters in which he implicated himself and maintains criminal exposure, and the prosecution’s failure to disclose those admissions until they were specifically requested, introduces not just prejudice, but a distortion of the process.”
In his testimony, Percival portrayed himself merely as an observer of the events surrounding Gopaul’s kidnapping and death.
But the defence said his testimony contradicted prior statements attributed to him in the US proceedings, which reveal that he was not a passive participant but a central architect of the criminal enterprise.
The judge said that the US transcripts were obtained by the defence and it highlighted a “concerning lack of prosecutorial compliance” to disclose the material from inception.
“Thus, the abuse lies not in what the defence was ultimately able to achieve with what they were eventually able to get, but in what the prosecution failed to do. The trial process must not only be fair in outcome, it must be seen to have been fair in operation.
“A prosecution that fails to make timely disclosure, especially in a case of this gravity, offends the integrity of the judicial process. Accordingly, I am satisfied that the prosecution’s conduct constitutes an abuse of the court’s process.”
Apart from upholding the no-case submission and ruling in favour of the abuse-of-process application, the judge went further, granting a permanent stay of proceedings for all four men. This means they cannot be prosecuted again for the crimes.
“If this matter were permitted to go to the jury, the outcome would be that the court would be seen as endorsing a prosecution built entirely upon the testimony of a witness who has previously and openly admitted to lying under similar pressures, and who continues to enjoy prosecutorial immunity that sustains his incentive to lie,” the judge added.
CMC/gh/ir/2025