Attorney Warren Cassell has been vindicated after the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal ruled that “a miscarriage of justice has occurred” in his case.
Cassell, who was sentenced to three and a-half years in prison in 2022 after being found guilty of concealing the proceeds of criminal conduct, has already completed his sentence at Her Majesty’s Prison in his homeland of Montserrat, having been released in December 2024.
The charges stemmed from allegations that between January 2007 and November 2008, Cassell had dishonestly concealed or disguised EC $855,380.54 by transferring funds from an investor’s account into an incorporated account for the sale of land.
According to the charge sheet, Cassell “dishonestly represented that he was a legitimate director of Providence Estate Limited and was legally entitled to sell land at the estate.”
He was accused of “fraudulently filing a change of directors application with the Companies Registry regarding said estate, and receiving funds into an incorporated business for the sale of land at Providence Estate for the purpose of avoiding prosecution for an offence or the making or enforcement of a confiscation order.”
The Montserratian-born attorney, who has practiced extensively in Antigua, represented himself during his original trial, which was presided over by His Lordship Justice Stanley John and lasted just over a week.
Richard Jory QC, DPP Oris Sullivan, and Henry Gordon appeared for the Crown.
Cassell filed an appeal against his conviction and sentence, submitting 14 grounds of appeal via a notice filed on July 5, 2022, and an amended notice filed on September 17, 2024, though not all grounds were pursued.
While the Court of Appeal rejected his first ground claiming that the charge was duplicitous, it found significant merit in his argument that the judge erred when denying a no-case submission.
“Failure by the Crown to properly tender the relevant documents was fatal to the case,” stated the Court of Appeal in its ruling.
The appellate court further noted: “In this matter, in the absence of documentary evidence, the case against the appellant was tenuous, and the jury was left with little or no evidence upon which to conclude that the necessary framework required for the essential elements of the charge was before them in order to come to a conclusion of guilt to the required standard.”
The Court emphasized that “The Crown’s … was such that a jury properly directed could not properly convict this appellant, and the learned trial judge ought to have accepted the no case submission.”
A key issue identified by the Court involved procedural failures in the handling of evidence: “During a trial, each piece of evidence should be marked and formally admitted….At no point in the transcript of proceedings of the court below were any documents tendered as exhibits and marked accordingly by the court as exhibits in the proceedings.”
The Court consequently ruled that “the documents ought not to have been shown to the jury.”
In addition, given that Cassell had already served his full sentence and was released in December 2024, the appellate court determined that “the court is not of the view that any useful purpose will be served by trying the appellant a third time.”
