Rama Valayden almost shouted in his opening speech to the jury on behalf of Sandip Moneea
THE ROLL call of witnesses heard over the past six weeks – almost 40 in all – includes detectives, hotel cleaners, scientists, photographers, mappers, businessmen, doctors and illiterate labourers.
Yesterday, that disparate collective grew even wider when the court heard quoted or extolled such figures as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, TV detective Columbo, God, Lyndon B Johnson and fictional lawyer Perry Mason.
All were invoked by Rama Valayden, barrister for one of the accused men, Sandip Moneea, in a wide-ranging opening speech to the jury. The court had previously heard comparatively little from Valayden – his questions tend to be succinct and his interventions spare – but his 90-minute address, formally opening his case, gave full display to the showmanship of this former politician.
“The French philosopher Voltaire said – I will put it in English for our Irish friends – ‘To the living we owe respect, but to the dead’, to Michaela Harte, ‘we owe only one thing: the truth’,” he said early on. “I am motivated by one sole factor, and that one factor is the truth.”
The evidence against Moneea is largely circumstantial. One of the prosecution witnesses – former hotel cleaner Raj Theekoy – has implicated the two defendants in the crime, saying he saw them walk away from the McAreaveys’ room shortly after hearing a woman inside screaming in pain.
Valayden urged the jurors to be “really, really cautious” about “this type of witness”, claiming he had found 75 contradictions in Theekoy’s evidence.
He then drew a lengthy analogy with the process of picking guavas to make jam. The prosecution case was the jam, and Theekoy was a large, juicy-looking guava that would turn out, on closer inspection, to be less tempting than it appeared.
The prosecution has spent a lot of time in recent weeks probing for gaps and inconsistencies in the accused men’s statements. Yesterday, Valayden asked the nine jurors to imagine a scenario where they found themselves accused of doing something they had not. “When you are under the stress of being accused of murder, are you your normal self? Some of you are teachers. You could easily be accused today of having molested a child. How do you answer that question?”
Referring to the hotel’s electronic door readings, which have been a source of dispute in court, Valayden said the evidence of Theekoy and other witnesses was “useless” because nobody had come forward to say these readings were correct. Police had carried out no tests to establish the times on each door.
“Are we Mauritians that stupid? Have we not watched Columbo for so many years? Are we that stupid not to carry out tests?”
At this point, Valayden’s voice rose sharply – he was almost shouting. “Must I not be angry? Must I not be the voice of those who cannot defend themselves?”
The police were “as satisfied as that team of Italy, who were defeated 4-0 yesterday. But we are not speaking about sporting things – we are talking about the lives of two people and, worse, the life of a person who came here on honeymoon. A person who, according to all I have heard, never did any harm to anyone. My anger is that we could have solved this easily.”
Had his client been implicated by scientific evidence, it would have been “game over”, he added. Not only was there no DNA or fingerprint evidence against Moneea, he said, but traces from a number of unidentified people were found at the crime scene.
The police may be “satisfied”, he repeated scathingly, but these were “question marks that will remain with us until the day we die”.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I was Perry Mason, that great fictional barrister who in the course of his case could bring forward the real murderer to face you. But I am no Perry Mason. I am Rama Valayden.”
