On December 22, 2009, a jury of 12 persons found Kenrick Williams guilty of murder by an 11-1 vote. Williams was charged for the 2004 murder of 16-year-old Elia Gonzalez, a student of C.C.C. who was found strangled to death near the Concepcion water tank area of Libertad Village.
He was expected to be sentenced this past Monday, but instead of a sentence taking place the court was informed that in a murder case where
capital punishment is a possibility there must be a unanimous verdict for a conviction. The trial judge who presided over the case, Herbert Lord, motioned a mistrial in the case and ordered that Williams be granted a retrial in the March 2010 session of the Supreme Court.
The motion for a mistrial was not ordered until the DPP representative who prosecuted the case, Trienia Young, made a submission before Justice Herbert Lord saying that the verdict was unacceptable. The law says that Justice Lord should correct the irregularity of the verdict before sentencing. According to the Jury Act, even though the majority voted guilty, the jurors should have deliberated a verdict of manslaughter if they could not reach a unanimous decision on the murder charge.
The murder of Elia Gonzalez which Kenrick Williams is accused of took place in Libertad Village in March 2004. Gonzalez, who was only sixteen-years-old and attending C.C.C., went missing on March 23, 2004 and her body was found by farmers near the municipal water tank on a feeder road between Concepcion Village and Libertad the following day. Her hands were tied and her uniform dress was above her waist and there were marks observed on her body to suggest that she was raped and strangled.
Williams, during his trial, denied the allegations and claims he never knew Gonzalez, but police later found her ring that had been sold by Williams to a woman in the village. The ring was positively identified by Gonzalez’s mother as belonging to Elia and that’s how police later charged Williams for the murder.
