Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
The killer of 12-year-old Kimone Lewis, of Rose Hall district, St. Catherine, is still at large as the Court of Appeal on Monday freed the man who was sentenced to hang for the crime.
The girl who was sent on an errand about 7.45 a.m. on August 24, 2001, was raped and murdered.
Delroy Stewart, coal vendor of Rose Hall, was convicted of the murder but the court found that insufficient evidence was presented by the prosecution to establish a case against him.
Attorney-at-law Dwight Reece argued on appeal that the presiding judge "in failing to uphold a submission of no case to answer made on behalf of the appellant on the basis that the only evidence against the appellant was the cautioned statement in evidence".
Stewart, who was represented at his trial by attorney-at-law Leslie Campbell, had given a cautioned statement to the police in which he said he was present when the killer hit the girl with a gun to the back of the head. He named the killer and said the killer ordered him at gun-point to take the girl into the bushes. The killer raped the girl, used a broken bottle to stab her and then threatened him that if he told anyone his family would be harmed.
Evidence was given at the trial in April 2004, that when the girl did not return home, an alarm was raised and community members launched a search for her. The body was found in bushes near the Rose Hall Community Centre with stab wounds to the head and neck and she was also raped.
Stewart was convicted of the murder on April 29, 2004.
The Court of Appeal, comprising Justice Seymour Panton, Justice Howard Cooke and Justice Zaila McCalla, ruled that although Stewart gave a cautioned statement to the police it was exculpatory as he had said in that statement that it was someone else who murdered the girl and the Crown did not prove otherwise.
The court said that the "non-participation of the appellant in the community search effort by itself is of no particular significance in excluding" the man who Stewart named as the murderer.
The court referred to the fact that clothing and other items were taken from Stewart and it did not appear that any effort was made to procure DNA evidence.
