DPP Asks CCJ to Overturn Ruling That Freed Oscar Selgado
Director of Public Prosecutions Cheryl-Lynn Vidal asked the Caribbean Court of Justice today to overturn the Court of Appeal ruling that quashed attorney Oscar Selgado’s conviction for abetment of murder. She argued that the lower court got the law wrong on three grounds.
Selgado walked free after the Court of Appeal ruled in December 2025 that his trial was fundamentally unfair.
The Court of Appeal based its decision on several concerns, including missing recordings, the defence’s inability to question the Crown’s main witness, and evidence it found unfairly prejudicial.
Vidal laid out the Crown’s three grounds to the court. She said the Court of Appeal “misunderstood and misapplied the principles set out by this court in its decision in Jafed Bennett against the Queen regarding the test for the admissibility of hearsay statements”, and as a result “erred in finding that the learned trial judge had wrongly admitted the hearsay statement of Jovanni Ramirez.”
Second, she argued the Court of Appeal “misinterpreted and misapplied the principle of evidence being more prejudicial than probative, and so erred in finding that the statement of Jovanni Ramirez was inadmissible on that basis.”
Third, she said the court below “improperly interfered with findings of fact made by the trial judge and substituted its own view without any rationale for so doing.”
Vidal told the court she would give “an exceedingly brief summary of the facts”, then go directly to the findings she takes issue with, then to the CCJ’s own judgement in Jafed Bennett against the Queen, which she called “really the base of this appeal”.