NOOR MOHAMED Vs. KING

JUDGEMENT

(1.) After hearing the arguments of counsel for the appellant and for the Crown, their Lordships announced that they would humbly advise His Majesty that this appeal should be allowed and the conviction of the appellant quashed, and would state their reasons for tendering this advice at a later date. Those reasons are set out in this judgment.

(2.) The appellant was tried before the Supreme Court of British Guiana on a charge of murdering a woman commonly known, and referred to during the trial, as Ayesha. The jury found him guilty, and be was sentenced to death. Evidence was admitted at the trial to which objection was taken by the appellant's counsel on the ground that it tended to show that the appellant had murdered another woman, his wife, Gooriah. It, was said on behalf of the appellant that the evidence ought to be excluded as being prejudicial to him and irrelevant. For the Crown it was contended, on grounds which it will be necessary to state later in this judgment, that the circumstances attending the two deaths made evidence concerning the earlier of them relevant to the charge. It was properly conceded at their Lordships Board on behalf of the Crown that, if the evidence were found to have been wrongly admitted, it would follow, according to the settled principles by which their Lordships are guided in criminal cases, that the appeal must be allowed.

(3.) The evidence which related directly to the charge of murdering Ayesha may be summarised as follows. The appellant's wife Gooriah died on 17 May 1944. At some time in that year Ayesha had left her husband and gone to live with him. They lived together as man and wife, and there was evidence that in the year 1945 they went through a ceremony of marriage according to the rites of the Mohammedan religion, although Ayesha's husband was still living. After the first few weeks of their union, their life together had not been happy. It was said that the appellant had often beaten Ayesha, and had sometimes driven her from his house. On one occasion she had lived apart from him for two weeks, though she seems to have continued to feel affection for him, and to have been anxious to return to him. The earlier, quarrels were due to the fact that the appellant suspected and accused her of infidelity. Later, he made a different charge against her. On a day in August 1916, a neighbour named Mildred James, who employed Ayesha to do some dress-making, witnessed an assault on her by the appellant. She tried to rescue Ayesha, whereupon the appellant said, according to the witness, "Through this woman people got to say I kill my first wife. She must go away." Ayesha refused to go, and the appellant was alleged to have threatened her with the words, "If you can't go alive you got to go dead." There was also evidence of a quarrel and a threat by the appellant to kill Ayesha on the night of 16 September 1946. On the morning of the following day, Ayesha died of poisoning by potassium cyanide.