Abou-Nehra was initially scheduled to be arraigned in January of this year, but for murder and not for manslaughter. The difference is you can get bail for manslaughter, but not for murder. For murder, you are automatically remanded to prison. In January, the accused failed to show up on his indictment day. All the court had was a letter from a doctor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, indicating that Abou-Nehra was medically incapable of traveling for his case.

But this did not stop the then Director of Public Prosecution (DPP), Kirk Anderson, from levying charges against him. In December of 2006, Anderson had instructed the Commissioner of Police, Gerald Westby, to charge Abou-Nehra with murder. That never happened because Anderson and Westby were on the “warpath.”  Westby simply ignored Anderson’s instructions.

In court this morning, Justice John “Troadio” Gonzalez told the court that the Abou-Nehra case has been traversed to the next court session, scheduled to begin next month, June 19.

The reason for the matter being traversed, said the court, was because of the long list of remand inmates who have been awaiting trial for the last two to three years.

Will the Chayben Abou-Nehra case ever make it to trial?  This is a question we have been asking, first the former DPP, Anderson, and now the new DPP, Lutchman Sooknandan, from whom we have not been able to get a comment. Sooknandan is responsible for downgrading Abou-Nehra’s charge of murder to manslaughter.

Last week the newspaper made several visits to the DPP’s office in an attempt to speak with him. We were told that the DPP was “unavailable,” and that in the future, we should call before coming.

We wanted Sooknandan to explain to us why, after Anderson was so insistent on having Abou-Nehra’s charge upgraded from manslaughter to murder, saying that contrary to what the police believed, there was enough evidence for a murder charge, he, Sooknandan, downgraded the charge back to manslaughter.