By RASHAD ROLLE
Tribune Staff Reporter
rrolle@tribunemedia.net
KOFHE Goodman, convicted of the murder of 11-year-old Marco Archer, will have his appeal against that conviction heard on March 18, 2020.
The date was set during a status hearing at the Court of Appeal yesterday.
Last month, the prosecution withdrew its appeal seeking the death penalty for Goodman, 43, who had been sentenced in a 2018 re-trial to 55 years imprisonment for killing Archer.
The Court of Appeal ruled in October that Goodman is to be assigned an attorney at the public’s expense to better enable him to appeal his sentence.
Archer, a student of Columbus Primary School, went missing from Brougham Street on September 23, 2011, and was found dead days later in bushes behind an apartment complex on Yorkshire Drive near where Goodman lived.
It is believed that Archer died from blunt force trauma to his head.
The little boy was reported missing by his family after failing to return home from a neighbourhood store where he went to purchase candy. His family begged for help in ensuring that he was returned home safely.
Goodman was initially convicted of Archer’s killing on August 2, 2013, and sentenced to death by hanging by Justice Bernard Turner on October 29, 2013.
However, the Court of Appeal overturned that conviction and sentence and ordered a retrial because of the “lurking doubt about the fairness of the trial” brought on by adverse pre-trial publicity, misconduct of Goodman’s then defence lawyer Geoffrey Farquharson and the former jury’s irregularity.
Goodman was reconvicted of the murder on May 30, 2017, following the second trial before Justice Carolita Bethel. Wayne Munroe, QC, represented him at the time.
In May of last year, Justice Bethel sentenced Goodman to 55 years in prison for killing the young boy after rejecting the Crown’s call for the death sentence. Seven years were ordered to be deducted from that sentence to account for time he had spent in custody up to that point.
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