A Connecticut, US-based Guyanese man lost a last-ditch effort for a new trial on Monday in the Waterbury Superior Court and now faces life imprisonment when he’s sentenced on Friday for murdering a fellow Guyanese, according to the online publication Republican-American.
A jury convicted
, 28, of murder in January after a prosecutor argued he had shot 38-year-old Michael Sembhudyal to death while the two were in an apartment in 2009.
The jury took about an hour and half to return its verdict, but Rabindranauth’s attorney, Matthew DiVito, argued on Monday that Judge Juliette Crawford had improperly instructed its members before deliberations began.
“Before juries begin to discuss a case to reach a verdict, judges will give them the definitions of the charges the defendant faces. In Rabindranauth’s case, he faced murder, but his attorneys wanted the jury to consider lesser offences, such as manslaughter and negligent homicide, if they cleared him of that crime”, Republican-American said.
Rabindranauth, who migrated to Queens, N.Y., when he was 14, never denied shooting Sembhudyal, but said he was terrified of him because Sembhudyal had threatened to have him killed, the report said.
Guyanese Yashoda Ramlal had told the court during the trial that she heard a “pop” and saw her ex-fiance and murder accused Rabindranauth stuffing a gun into his sweatshirt.
According to Republican-American, Ramlal told the court that she heard a “pop” while she stood in a third-floor bedroom of her family’s home.
She said he looked into the kitchen, saw her cousin, Sembhudyal with a look of shock on his face and saw her ex-fiancé, Rabindranauth, stuffing a silver gun into the pocket of his sweatshirt.
“I saw him stumble into the living room, then I saw the blood,” she said of Sembhudyal, according to Republican-American.
