By Joel Julien joel.julien@trinidadexpress.com
AN INHERENT bias against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgenders (LGBT) community exists in this country’s adjudication of homicide trials, a recently-completed report has stated.
Se-shauna Wheatle, Stipendiary Lecturer at Exeter College, Oxford, England, presented the report at the Noor Hassanali lecture theatre of the Law Faculty of the University of the West Indies’ (UWI) St Augustine campus on Wednesday.
The report is entitled “A Study of Adjudication in homicide cases involving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) persons in the Caribbean”.
Among the Caribbean cases the study focused on the Paul Cox and Marvin Marcano murder trials in Trinidad and Tobago.
On May 23, 2003, Cox, of Coalmine Road in Sangre Grande, killed his estranged girlfriend Deidre-Ann Layne before attempting suicide.
Cox claimed Layne was in a lesbian relationship with a female friend which drove him to take her life.
And Marcano and a friend, who were both teenagers at the time, were at the home of 58-year-old fashion designer Christopher Lynch when a sexual advance triggered violence.
Lynch was chopped to death by Marcano.
Marcano was originally sentenced to hang, but an Appeal Court decision by then Chief Justice Sat Sharma and Justices Margot Warner and Wendell Kangaloo allowed Marcano to walk free.
“There could be nothing more reprehensible than a gay advance and this is the sort of thing that sends people crazy in a frenzy,” Sharma was quoted as saying in his judgment, Wheatle stated.
Wheatle said the local criminal justice system with its adjudication was “accepting and legitimising prejudices against LGBT”.
Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal said there was a bias in the local justice system toward “minorities”, including the LGBT community.
“In the many years that I have practised at the criminal bar I have, I am forced to say, noticed that there is a bias in the adjudication processes in respect of criminal cases in relation to minorities and that includes LGBT persons,” Seetahal said.
“When an LGBT person is killed, it is the easiest thing for the offender to claim he made an advance towards me, there is no one to deny it,” she said.
Seetahal said the law does not seem to make a distinction between violent and non-violent advances by members of the LGBT community.
“The law does not seem to make much differentiation when it comes to a LGBT person and the same, of course, is not so for a heterosexual. Imagine any male or female person being charged with an offence saying ‘he made an advance toward me or she made an advance toward me of the opposite sex’.
“The natural response would be and because that is not any reason to resort to killing, but in these jurisdictions in the Commonwealth where we are still homophobic, once you say that, that is like a red light,” Seetahal said.
“The bias is so entrenched in my view that often all it takes is for the allegation that there was an advance and that is enough,” she said.
Seetahal said it is time that inequities in the justice system are addressed.
“It is time therefore that we confront this inequity, the current inequity (against LGBT) and I hope the group in the future will look at other inequities so far as the treatment of differently-abled persons and the mentally challenged and there are many other minorities that are not treated fairly in this society,” she said.
And Colin Robinson, executive director of the Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation (CAISO), said: “Homosexual lives have diminished value under the law.”
