More than three decades after the brutal killing of a senior government official shook Antigua, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal has dismissed the final appeal of the man convicted in the case — closing one of the country's longest-running criminal matters.
According to Antigua.news, the court dismissed the appeal of Everton Welch, a Gray's Farm man convicted in 1994 of murdering Rolston Samuel, who served at the time as Comptroller of Customs.
Samuel was killed on January 8, 1993, at his Friars Hill home — a property overlooking St. John's Harbour and the Oil Refinery. His body was discovered with catastrophic injuries, including serious wounds to his neck, head and fingers, multiple broken facial bones, and trauma consistent with repeated blows from a heavy object. The killing of a man of his stature sent ripples through Antiguan society and set in motion a prosecution that would take years to conclude and decades more to fully resolve.
The trial that followed was substantial. Jamaican Maurice James, serving as Director of Public Prosecutions, led the case for the Crown, while Attorney Harold Lovell represented Welch. After several days of proceedings, a jury of five women and four men returned a guilty verdict on June 21, 1994, following roughly two hours of deliberation. The presiding judge noted one significant mitigating factor: Welch had been just 17 years old at the time of the offence. That circumstance spared him the maximum penalty, and he was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.
The matter did not end there. In 2019, Welch successfully won the right to file a constitutional motion challenging whether his sentencing had been lawful. The issue was procedural — he had not been present when his sentence was formally handed down in May 2015, and his lawyers argued that this absence violated his constitutional right to be present at his own trial.
The Court of Appeal agreed with him on that narrower point. It found that Welch had never been properly informed that his sentencing would proceed on May 27, 2015, and that without that knowledge he could not be said to have consented to the hearing going ahead without him. The judges were also critical of his legal counsel at the time, finding that the attorney had failed in his duty to inform the presiding judge that he had not been in contact with his client, and had neither sought an adjournment nor obtained Welch's instructions before the hearing proceeded.
However, the Court drew a clear distinction between a procedural failing and an unfair trial. The central question, the judges ruled, was not whether Welch had formally waived his rights, but whether — viewed in its entirety — he had still received a fair process. On that question, they found that he had. By the time of the May 2015 hearing, all substantive sentencing submissions had already been fully argued before the court two weeks earlier, with Welch present. The only remaining business was the delivery of a written judgment. His attorney was present throughout, raised no objection, and made no application to adjourn — a presence the Court found sufficient to protect his client's interests.
The appeal was dismissed with no order as to costs. Welch has already served his sentence and was released several years ago.
