Mother of two returned to jail in firearms case

Cayman courts, Grand Cayman

(CNS): A 27-year-old local mother was returned to jail Tuesday to serve out a two-year term following a gun conviction. Julia Lewis was not just a defendant but a key witness in a case against two West Bay men, who were both jailed for ten years Tuesday for possession of a loaded pistol. Jordan Manderson (22) and Albert Jackson (22) were given the mandatory minimum sentences after at a trial last year, in which Lewis testified the gun she had tried to throw into a rubbish bin had been with Jackson when he picked her up from work, with Manderson already in the car.

Lewis was sentenced by the judge on the basis of exceptional circumstances and she avoided the eight-year term she had faced before she testified against the two men. Having already served around eight months on remand after she pleaded guilty, she was released on bail when she agreed to testify against her co-defendants, who both said the gun belonged to Lewis and not them. Despite the best efforts of her attorney to bring the sentence down to just one year so that the mother of two young children would not have to return to custody, Justice Michael Mettyear stuck to a two-year term and chose not to suspend the sentence.

He acknowledged that Lewis never wanted any dealings with the gun and she was acting in fear of both men when she gave several false accounts to the police in the wake of her arrest. He said her contact with the weapon was seconds rather than minutes and she had acted as she did to distance herself from the pistol and made “a rash judgment”.

Justice Mettyear said he formed a positive view of Lewis during the trial and said he was sure she regrets her part in this episode. However, he raised concerns that after she had thrown the weapon into bushes behind Foster’s Supermarket, because the security guard had stopped her from throwing it in a waste bin, she showed Manderson where the pistol was.

The judge said he was convinced that Manderson had every intention of retrieving the gun and, had things worked out differently, the weapon might still be on the streets posing a threat. He described what Lewis did as “very serious conduct” because she had directed “a dangerous man to where a gun was”, making it impossible that she could escape a jail term.

Lewis found herself facing the firearms charges when Jackson, who was driving her car, crashed after attempting to evade police in August 2013 at Countryside Shopping Village in Savannah. Lewis told the court she knew nothing of the gun when it was produced by Jackson during the drive from Governor’s Square on the West Bay Road. But after the crash, the gun, which Jackson had in his lap, slid to the floor and Lewis threw it out of the car window, setting off a chain of events that saw her tell a number of lies before she was charged.

Jordan and Jackson were also arrested at the time but neither of the men were charged as they denied any knowledge of the weapon. With CCTV evidence pointing to Lewis, she was the only one charged until she agreed to tell the truth about what happened.

The incident began when Jackson had picked up a drunk Manderson in West Bay as he headed to collect Lewis,with whom he was in a relationship at the time. On the way he crashed into another vehicle and left the scene but the driver he hit alerted police. A police patrol then spotted the car in Savannah but Jackson sped off when the officer tried to pull the car over and crashed into a light pole.

Jackson got out and ran off, leaving Manderson and Lewis by the car. After she tossed the weapon from the car, the gun was in the middle of the road and Manderson told Lewis to hide it in the back of her jeans. Instead, she ran across to the shopping plaza and tried to throw it in the garbage, when she was intercepted by a security guard.

She pleaded with him to give her the weapon back, which he did. She then threw the gun into bushes behind Foster’s and when Manderson turned up in another vehicle driven by friends, she showed him where it was. The court also heard that despite taking the loaded pistol from the garbage, the security guard did not keep the weapon nor did he contact the authorities. After Lewis pleaded with him that she did not want to go to jail, he handed it back to her but he was never arrested.

When Manderson’s sentence was considered, his lawyer argued that there were exceptional circumstances for the young West Bay man, based on his severe learning difficulties. The attorney said that the 22-year-old man had the IQ of an eight year old and was described as being on the higher end of the retardation scale by a psychiatrist. However, the judge was not persuaded and handed Manderson the ten-year mandatory term.

Meanwhile, Jackson, who has a string of violent convictions, could only appeal to the mercy of the court. Despite his rap sheet the judge did not increase the mandatory tariff and he, too, received a ten-year term.