Previously convicted and sentenced to 30 years in jail for raping an eight-year-old girl back in 2016, Colin Cummings, after facing a retrial, has been found not guilty of committing the offence.
A jury on Tuesday, unanimously acquitted Cummings.
The now sixty-year-old man had been accused of sexually penetrating the young girl on August 20th, 2016.
Following his conviction and sentence back in 2018, the former gold miner filed an appeal, in which he argued that the judge who conducted that first trial, erred in not adequately putting his defence to the jury at the time.
Cummings’ case was that he was elsewhere at the time of the alleged commission of the offence, and therefore could not have committed what was being alleged against him.
He had successfully argued before the Guyana Court of Appeal, that the trial judge’s failure in putting his defence of alibi to the jury, had ultimately cost him his freedom.
The appellate court found that Justice Simone Morris-Ramlall had so erred.
As a result, it quashed and set aside both Cummings’ conviction and sentence while ordering that he be afforded a fresh trial.
It is at the conclusion of that new trial that a jury, following hours of deliberations on Tuesday, decided in favour of the former accused.
The trial proceedings were held in-camera before Justice Navindra Singh at the Sexual Offences Court of the High Court in Demerara.
Cummings was represented by defence attorney Kevin Morgan.
