Hearing under way on preliminary issue in Keith Clarke murder case

A hearing has commenced in the High Court to determine a preliminary issue about whether the Keith Clarke murder case should proceed to trial.

The media was allowed inside the courtroom on Wednesday but has been barred by the presiding judge from reporting details of the hearing.

The case has been ongoing since 2012 when chief prosecutor Paula Llewellyn ruled that three soldiers, lance corporals Greg Tingling and Odel Buckley, as well as private Arnold Henry, be charged for killing Clarke.

The businessman was shot 21 times inside his home, located on Kirkland Close, in St Andrew, on March 27, 2010, during a police-military operation to apprehend then fugitive drug lord Christopher 'Dudus' Coke.

The murder trial was set to begin in 2018 when lawyers for the Jamaica Defence Force surprised prosecutors with immunity certificates that shielded the soldiers from prosecution for their actions during the operation.

The certificates were signed in February 2016 by Peter Bunting, who was minister of national security at the time of the operations.

The signing of the certificate took place almost six years after Clarke's death and four years after the ruling by Llewellyn, the director of public prosecutions, that murder charges be laid against the soldiers.

But following a legal challenge, the Constitutional Review Court, in a majority decision handed down in February 2020, ruled that the certificates were manifestly unfair and unreasonable.

However, while overturning that decision in a judgment handed down in January last year, the Court of Appeal affirmed an order by the Constitutional Court that the trial should go ahead.

But, the Court of Appeal, Jamaica's second-highest court, ordered that before the trial begins, a voir dire or a trial within the trial, must be conducted by a judge alone to determine whether prosecutors “can rebut the certificates of good faith issued by the minister”.

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