High Court Judge Justice Priscilla Chandra-Hanif today refused an application by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) seeking her recusal from the case against four men who are preparing to stand trial for the September 2020 murder of 17-year-old Haresh Singh.

The application stemmed from the High Court Judge’s decision to separate the trial of the first-named accused from that of the three other accused.

Dissatisfied with that decision, the DPP applied for the Judge to reconsider her ruling, but when that application was refused, the DPP filed an application for the Judge to recuse herself from hearing the case.

In its application, the State argued that there was a real possibility that issues remaining for trial — particularly the credibility of contested identification and alibi evidence, as well as the caution statement attributed to the first-named accused — had been “prejudged.”

But in her decision today, Justice Chandra-Hanif said a fair-minded observer, reading the judgment as a whole and in the context of the procedural setting in which it was delivered, would not be led to believe that bias was present.

The Judge said mounting an argument of bias based on a collection of isolated words or phrases, without context, only serves to dilute their true meaning and create unnecessary theatrics.

“Most importantly, the ultimate assessment of identification evidence, alibi evidence, witness credibility and guilt in the contemplated trial is not of the judge. It belongs to the jury”, Justice Chandra-Hanif ruled.

Justice Chandra-Hanif said recusal has consequences for the administration of justice, and she reasoned that while the duty to preserve public confidence requires a Judge to withdraw from a case where the test for recusal is met, public confidence is not served by treating every strongly contested ruling as grounds for disqualification.

“Judges are required to decide difficult applications, sometimes adversely to one party, and to give intelligent reasons. If the giving of reasons on a severance application were itself sufficient to disqualify the judgment from the trial, ordinary criminal case management would become unworkable,” Justice Chandra-Hanif said.

The Judge said she was not satisfied that a fair-minded and informed observer, having considered all the facts and the proper procedural context, would conclude that there was a real possibility that the Court was biased or had prejudged the issues reserved for trial.

In arriving at her decision, the Judge considered the issues raised, submissions from both the State and the Defence, and a number of legal authorities. She also considered comparative authorities dealing with juries and prejudgment, in addition to the governing legal test.

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