Two men serving life sentences for a deadly 2011 home invasion in Westmoreland, Jamaica, have seen their final attempt to overturn their convictions rejected after the island’s Court of Appeal refused permission to introduce previously undisclosed police evidence that they claimed would prove their innocence.
Carvel Hines and Bruce Lamey were found guilty by a seven-member jury at the Westmoreland Circuit Court in February 2017 on charges of murder and wounding with intent. The crimes dated back to January 27, 2011, when the pair allegedly forced entry into the home of 72-year-old Bernice Clarke and her 67-year-old husband Clement in Clark’s Town. Prosecutors argued the attack was carried out that night shortly after 8 p.m., leaving Bernice dead and Clement wounded by gunfire. He survived only by playing dead after the shooting.
In March 2017, the court handed down dual sentences: 18 years of hard labor for the wounding conviction, and a life term for the murder conviction, with a requirement that each man serve a minimum of 33 years behind bars before becoming eligible for parole. All sentences were ordered to run concurrently. An initial application for leave to appeal was turned down in 2018, and the pair launched a second bid that included a motion to admit the new evidence from the 2011 police station log.
The appeal panel, made up of three senior judges, heard the application across two hearings in December 2023 and May 2024, and issued a final ruling rejecting the motion. In their ruling, the judges issued an unqualified apology to both the convicted men and other parties for the multi-year delay in delivering their decision.
The sole eyewitness to the crime was Clement Clarke, who survived the attack. He told the trial that he heard a loud impact on his front door, went to investigate, and found Hines — a man he already knew — standing inside his hallway, armed with a gun. Clarke grabbed a machete to defend himself, but Hines shot him, forcing him to drop the weapon. As he retreated to his bedroom, Hines continued firing and followed him inside, then shot Bernice Clarke. Lamey, who Clarke also knew by sight, joined Hines in the bedroom and also opened fire on the 72-year-old, according to the eyewitness testimony. Clarke fell on top of his wife and pretended to be dead until the two men left the property, then called police for help. He was treated for his wounds at a local hospital, but Bernice Clarke died from her injuries.
At the original trial, both Hines and Lamey denied any involvement in the attack and claimed they were not present at the scene. Hines argued he was with his partner in St Ann on the night of the murder, while Lamey stated he was a father of three and would never commit such a violent crime.
The fresh evidence the pair sought to introduce was a single line entry from the Bethel Town Police Station diary, written the day after the murder by a detective corporal, that noted the killing was believed to be a reprisal attack. Attorneys for the men argued that the prosecution’s failure to disclose this diary entry before and during the trial violated its legal duty to share potentially exculpatory evidence. They contended the entry undermined the credibility of Clement Clarke’s identification of the two men as the attackers, and would have opened new avenues of investigation for the defense that could have changed the trial’s outcome.
Prosecutors pushed back against these claims, noting that the defense never requested access to the police station diary before or during the 2017 trial, and that the document was available for the defense to obtain if they had sought it out. The Crown also argued that the line about a reprisal motive was purely speculative, not factual, and would not have impacted the jury’s assessment of Clarke’s identification of the defendants.
In their ruling dismissing the application, the appeal judges agreed with the prosecution’s assessment. They noted that the diary entry was not a record of direct sensory observation by the officer, but merely a note of an unsubstantiated belief about the motive, meaning it could not qualify as credible factual evidence. Even if it had been introduced at trial, the panel ruled, the entry would not have changed the jury’s guilty verdict. The court added that the core information from the entry was already brought to the jury’s attention as part of the defense’s original case, so it could not qualify as new material that meets the legal standard for admission on appeal. For these reasons, the application to admit the fresh evidence was refused.