After more than four and a half decades behind bars for a 1978 high-profile murder, a Caribbean appellate court has overturned a controversial 50-year prison sentence imposed on Peter Matthews, ordering an emergency new sentencing hearing before a senior High Court judge over a critical legal error that undermined decades of judicial proceedings.
The core of the case dates back to 1978, when four-year-old Roslyn Lucas was found dead at her St James Providence Estate home following a sexual assault. Matthews was ultimately convicted of the child’s murder in 1984, originally handed a death sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment in 1994. In a 2025 resentencing proceeding, High Court Justice Maria Busby Earle-Caddle issued a fresh 50-year term. Calculating the 46 years, eight months and 25 days Matthews had already served in pre-trial and post-conviction custody, the original resentencing left just over three additional years of prison time to complete. Alongside the sentence, the judge mandated psychological evaluation, participation in targeted rehabilitation programs including the cognitive behavioral initiative Thinking for Change and adult literacy courses, and post-release probation supervision.
But the three-justice appellate panel – led by Justices Nolan Bereaux, Maria Wilson and Geoffrey Henderson – ruled last week that the entire 2025 resentencing process was fundamentally invalid. The fatal flaw? The lower court failed to correctly and conclusively establish Matthews’ age at the time of the 1978 killing, a detail with profound legal consequences for the case.
In her written ruling, Justice Wilson emphasized that the sentencing judge had a clear obligation to adjourn proceedings to resolve the age question before issuing a new sentence, given how central the detail was to Matthews’ legal classification. “It is very unfortunate that the resentencing judge did not find it appropriate to adjourn her decision until she was able to resolve the age of the appellant,” Wilson wrote, noting that the error carried “very serious” consequences for a man who had already spent most of his life in incarceration.
New evidence accepted by the appellate court – an official birth certificate – confirms Matthews was born on July 14, 1961, meaning he was only 17 years old when the crime occurred. Under the law in effect in 1978, this classification made him a child offender, a status that carried strict legal protections: people under the age of 18 could not lawfully be sentenced to death. Because his original 1984 death sentence was unlawful on its face, every subsequent legal proceeding that flowed from that sentence – including the 1994 commutation to life imprisonment and the 2025 resentencing – was also legally invalid.
The appellate court described the case as highly unusual and legally unprecedented in its complexity. “This is a case where the sentence of death was unlawfully imposed on the appellant,” the court’s ruling noted.
Matthews’ defense team, led by attorneys Joseph Sookoo and Abigail Roach, had long argued that their client should have been sentenced from the start as a minor offender. This classification would drastically lower the applicable sentencing range, require a court to prioritize rehabilitation over punitive sentencing, and mandate regular periodic review of Matthews’ incarceration to assess his readiness for release.
Representatives of the state, led by attorney Wayne Rajbansie, initially challenged the authenticity of the newly submitted birth certificate in written legal filings. However, during oral arguments before the appellate court, Rajbansie withdrew the challenge and conceded that the birth certificate was valid, confirming that the original 1984 death sentence was indeed unlawful.