Lawyer accuses family of collusion in murder case

(CNS): The uncles and aunts of Jovin Omar Fuentes (32), who was shot and killed last summer in front of them, were not telling the truth when they gave evidence in the trial of Javon James Dixon (29) and colluded against him even though he was not the gunman, defence lawyer Amelia Fosuhene claimed as she presented a summary of her client’s defence to the jury on Wednesday. She told them that the inconsistencies and inaccuracies among all four were so great that they could not be sure the witnesses were telling the truth that they saw Dixon kill their nephew in Bodden Town outside a mini-mart on 1 July 2022.

Fosuhene criticised the police inquiry and accused the officers involved of doing nothing to follow up on the information Dixon had given them about the man who he says killed Fuentes. The defence lawyer asked the jury how they could convict a man of murder when there were so many inconsistencies in the evidence given by the witnesses and when the police investigation lacked integrity.

With failures and inconsistencies throughout the case, the crown had not brought the jury the truth about what had happened, and the allegations against her client were so contradictory that they did not make sense, she said.

“If you believe one eyewitness, then what do you do with the rest?” she asked the jury as she outlined some of the differences in the details of the killing given by Fuentes’ family. During the trial, the victim’s aunts and uncles had differed about when and how many shots were fired, where Fuentes and Dixon were standing and how the incident had unfolded. But the common agreement was that none of them saw another man in Dixon’s car and that it was Dixon who had the gun and shot Fuentes dead.

Since the CCTV footage showed that the evidence the family gave was at times inconsistent, Fosuhene suggested that if they could lie about the small things, the jury could be sure that the family had lied about the “big things as well”. She suggested they had colluded to frame Dixon.

With four people telling four different stories, which she claimed all differed from what the jury had seen on the CCTV, but yet all coming to the same conclusion that Dixon was the murderer, Fosuhene asked, “Is it collusion?… What version are you supposed to believe?”

Working to raise a reasonable doubt based on the different versions of what happened at the scene and when it happened, the defence attorney said the CCTV had disproved their accounts and none of the crown witnesses were credible. The evidence showed that there was a “level of collusion” among the family members, she said.

Fosuhene also took aim at all of the police officers involved in the investigation, suggesting that they had been blinkered from the outset, and once they had arrested Dixon, they believed that they had their man. As a result, when Dixon told them he had picked up a hitchhiker whom he knew as “Blacks”, they did not investigate his story at all. She said they had not conducted a fair or impartial investigation because their minds were already closed. “They did nothing,” she said.

The defence lawyer outlined the failure of the scenes of crime team who took five days to examine the car Dixon was driving that day. She said they even failed to swab the passenger side of the car where Dixon claimed Blacks had been when he pulled out a gun and shot Fuentes. She said no house-to-house inquiries were conducted and no CCTV was pulled to try to find Blacks in Bodden Town. All of this, she said, “betrayed the entire attitude of this investigation: ‘we’ve got our guy’.”

Fosuhene accused the police of only wanting to consider evidence that pointed in the direction they wanted it to point. She said that there “would have been evidence if they had bothered to look” that could have supported what her client had said about Blacks. And, she told the jury, if the police had not conducted a fair investigation, they could not come to a fair verdict against Dixon. “At no point did they take this investigation seriously,” she added as she accused the officers of weighting and tainting the evidence.

She also dismissed the crown’s claim that the motive for the murder was a $175 debt between the two men who had been friends for years, describing it as “ridiculous”.

Fosuhene told the jury that the crown was expecting them to believe four conflicting accounts of the same event. But on no version of the witnesses’ evidence could Dixon be the one who shot Fuentes, she said. The jury could not rely on the crown’s evidence and they could not send a man to prison based on it, she added, as she asked the twelve men and women to return a not guilty verdict.

The case continues as the presiding judge, Justice Cheryll Richards, directs the jury on the law and summarises the evidence, before sending them to deliberate.