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THE Appeal Court last week released the judgement it had reserved in the case involving a St Andrew man, who was in 2014 sentenced to life in prison for allegedly murdering a sleeping child at a Chisholm Avenue in St Andrew in 2010.The accused, Jermaine Plunkett, following a trial in the Home Circuit Court, had been sentenced by a jury to life imprisonment with the stipulation that he should serve a minimum of 32 years before becoming eligible for parole.Following his subsequent application for leave to appeal sentence and conviction the Appeal Court, which heard the matter in June and then earlier this month, acquitted Plunkett of the charges and further quashed his conviction and sentence based on what it said were flaws in the then judge's handling of weaknesses in the identification evidence which it said rendered the conviction "unsafe".In the case brought by the prosecution involving seven witnesses, the crucial evidence was that of the sole eyewitness, the dead boy's elder brother. According to the brother, on the fateful morning of November 23, 2010, at approximately 3:00 am, he was in his room at 68 Chisholm Avenue, along with the deceased and a male friend who was sleeping on a chair beside the bed. On hearing voices outside his room, the elder brother, in going to check, said three men forcefully entered the room and immediately began to fire shots in the direction of the friend who was sleeping in the chair.Following the shooting it was discovered that the friend and child had been shot. The child died a day later.He subsequently identified Plunkett as the person inside the room, in front of the other two men. Plunkett's conviction rested entirely on the uncorroborated visual identification of him by the child's elder brother.The Appeal Court, in its ruling handed down last week, said the then judge had been duty-bound, at the close of the prosecution's case, to properly evaluate the specific weaknesses in the identification, and assess their collective effect on the quality and adequacy of the identification evidence."This she failed to do. Had the learned judge done so, she would have been obliged to withdraw the case from the jury. In our judgement, the learned judge erred when she dismissed the no-case submission. It follows, therefore, that, on this basis alone, the conviction must be quashed," the court stated.Commenting on the judge's summation, the court further said, "even with the concession of the Crown, and although the appellant made no complaints about the summation, we consider it necessary to state that the safety of the conviction would, nevertheless, have faltered on the failure of the learned judge to properly draw the attention of the jury to some specific weaknesses in the identification evidence".The court further noted that while the learned judge identified some of the weaknesses in the identification evidence, such as the inconsistencies concerning the lighting, duration of the incident, identification of the two other men and where the witness was when the shooting began, she did not review and point out to the jury other aspects of the evidence as specific weaknesses."It was the duty of the learned judge, not simply to refer to counsel's view on the specific weaknesses in the identification evidence, but to put them all, fairly and properly, before the jury as weaknesses recognised by the court, as distinct from counsel, for their special consideration. It follows that even if the learned judge had not been obliged to withdraw the case from the jury, her summation was flawed in this respect and, in the light of all the evidence, would affect the safety of the conviction", the court said."For the reasons outlined above, the conviction is rendered unsafe... Accordingly, the orders of the court are: The application for leave to appeal against conviction is granted. The application for leave to appeal conviction is treated as the hearing of the appeal against conviction. The appeal against conviction and sentence is allowed. The conviction is quashed, the sentence is set aside, and a judgement and verdict of acquittal entered," the court concluded.