ST. THOMAS — The V.I. Supreme Court has upheld Jacques Cajuste’s conviction for aiding and abetting the first-degree murder of well-known St. Thomas businessman Egbert “Manno” Stuart, rejecting challenges involving the 14-year delay before murder charges were brought, the DNA evidence used at trial, the murder weapon, hospital records and the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury’s verdict.

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In a 58-page opinion filed Thursday, the court affirmed the Superior Court’s June 30, 2022 denial of Cajuste’s motion to dismiss the murder charges, upheld the trial court’s major evidentiary rulings, and affirmed the January 2023 judgment that sentenced him to spend the remainder of his natural life in prison without the possibility of parole. Justice Maria M. Cabret authored the opinion for a three-justice panel that also included Chief Justice Rhys S. Hodge and Associate Justice Ive Arlington Swan.

The ruling marks the latest chapter in a murder case dating to June 22, 2005, when Stuart was discovered inside the St. Thomas residence he shared with his wife, Viviane Stuart, and their young son. According to the Supreme Court, Stuart was found wearing only briefs and covered in blood, with multiple stab wounds to his chest, back and neck and a kitchen-type knife approximately one foot long still lodged in his neck. Investigators found signs of a violent struggle in the bedroom where his body was discovered but no indications of forced entry or burglary.

The Consortium reported when arrests were made in 2016 that Stuart was a prominent St. Thomas businessman known for operating Manno’s West Indian Restaurant near the Fort Christian parking lot in Charlotte Amalie. Cajuste was arrested in Pennsylvania while Stuart’s widow was arrested on St. Thomas as investigators revived a case that had been cold for years.

The Supreme Court said the investigation was transferred from the V.I. Police Department’s Major Crimes Team to the Cold Case Squad between 2007 and 2008 and remained dormant until 2016, when investigators renewed their work and located Cajuste in Pennsylvania. Cajuste and Stuart were ultimately tried together in August 2022, and a jury found each guilty of aiding and abetting first-degree murder. Thursday’s opinion addresses Cajuste’s appeal only; the court noted that Stuart filed a separate appeal of her conviction.

A central issue in Cajuste’s appeal was the lengthy period between Stuart’s death and the filing of charges. Cajuste argued that the roughly 14-year precharge delay deprived him of due process because witnesses had died and evidence had been lost, making it more difficult to defend himself. The Superior Court rejected that argument before trial, finding that Cajuste had not demonstrated the substantial, actual prejudice required under existing V.I. Supreme Court precedent.

Cajuste also argued on appeal that the Revised Organic Act of 1954 provides criminal defendants greater due-process protection than the federal Constitution and that the Superior Court should therefore have used a more demanding standard when reviewing the delay. The Supreme Court did not decide that broader constitutional question, concluding instead that Cajuste had failed to sufficiently develop and preserve the argument before the trial court. The justices said his references to the Revised Organic Act had been vague and largely unsupported by developed legal analysis, leaving the issue waived for purposes of appeal.

The court nevertheless considered Cajuste’s precharge-delay argument under federal due-process standards. Under that test, a defendant must first establish that the delay caused actual and substantial prejudice to the defense before the government is required to justify why prosecution took so long. The court described that threshold as a heavy burden requiring more than speculation that evidence or testimony might have been useful.

Cajuste pointed in particular to the death of Iris Adina Brady, whose sons testified about a kitchen knife associated with the home where Cajuste was staying, and to the destruction of handwritten records from his June 23, 2005 emergency-room visit at Roy Lester Schneider Hospital. Those paper records were lost following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Cajuste argued that the missing material impaired his ability to challenge the government’s case.

The Supreme Court disagreed. It found that Cajuste had not identified specific exculpatory information that Brady would have provided and noted that her son Ishmael Rodriquez had personal knowledge of the knife and was available for cross-examination. As for the medical records, the court found that Cajuste failed to identify what material information had disappeared with the handwritten file, while an electronic version of the relevant medical information remained available. His claims therefore amounted to speculation rather than proof that the delay had meaningfully impaired his defense.

Because Cajuste failed to establish actual and substantial prejudice, the justices said they did not need to examine the government’s reasons for waiting years to bring the murder charges. The court consequently upheld the Superior Court’s refusal to dismiss the case. Cajuste separately complained that the trial court took nearly two years to rule on his dismissal motion and did not hold an evidentiary hearing, but the Supreme Court found those arguments insufficiently developed on appeal and treated them as waived.

The justices also rejected Cajuste’s challenge to the admission of the knife found lodged in Stuart’s neck. Cajuste argued that prosecutors failed to establish an adequate chain of custody, but the court pointed to testimony from retired VIPD Officer Delbert Phipps, Officer Daphne Rouse Carty and medical examiner Dr. Francisco Landron identifying the weapon and describing how it moved from the crime scene through the morgue, forensic processing and secure evidence storage.

The Supreme Court found that testimony sufficient to authenticate the knife and noted there was no evidence of tampering, bad faith or mishandling that would justify excluding it. Even a possible defect in a properly authenticated item’s chain of custody, the court said, ordinarily affects how much weight a jury should give the evidence rather than whether it can be admitted at all.

Cajuste also challenged testimony from Ishmael Rodriquez, who identified the knife as resembling one belonging to his mother and said he did not see it in her home after learning about the homicide. Cajuste argued that some of Rodriquez’s knowledge originated with his now-deceased mother and therefore implicated hearsay and his constitutional right to confront witnesses. The Supreme Court found that Rodriquez possessed sufficient personal knowledge and further noted that Cajuste’s own attorney had elicited the challenged portion of the testimony during cross-examination, preventing Cajuste from relying on it as grounds for reversal.

One of the most significant portions of the appeal concerned the FBI DNA evidence. Cajuste argued that Agent Jeremy Fletcher’s report improperly relied on earlier laboratory work performed by analysts who did not testify at trial, depriving him of the opportunity to cross-examine those individuals and rendering the evidence unfairly prejudicial. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, finding that Fletcher independently reviewed the earlier serology information, personally performed and interpreted the DNA testing, prepared his own report and testified at trial, where the defense had the opportunity to cross-examine him.

The court distinguished Cajuste’s case from U.S. Supreme Court precedent barring prosecutors from introducing one scientist’s testimonial laboratory report through a different analyst who neither performed nor observed the underlying test. Fletcher, the V.I. Supreme Court said, was not simply a substitute witness repeating another analyst’s conclusion; he testified about a report containing his own opinions based on DNA testing he personally performed. The court therefore found no violation of Cajuste’s confrontation rights.

The justices also found the DNA evidence highly probative. Fletcher testified that Cajuste was the major contributor to mixed DNA profiles recovered from both the bedroom where Stuart’s body was found and the hallway of the apartment. Manno Stuart could not be excluded as a minor contributor to those same profiles. The Supreme Court said Cajuste’s DNA in those locations “unequivocally placed him at the crime scene,” while the mixed profiles supported an inference that Cajuste and Stuart had been in close physical contact around the time of the killing.

The court also upheld the admission of an electronic Schneider Hospital record documenting Cajuste’s June 23, 2005 emergency-room visit. Cajuste argued that the electronic record was not an exact copy of the handwritten file destroyed during the 2017 hurricanes and that the hospital employee who authenticated it was not qualified because she did not personally enter the information in 2005. The Supreme Court rejected both claims, finding that the hospital’s records custodian sufficiently explained the system used to create and preserve such records and that any incompleteness affected the weight of the document rather than its admissibility.

Beyond the evidentiary disputes, Cajuste argued that the prosecution had failed to present enough evidence for a rational jury to convict him. The Supreme Court disagreed, pointing not only to the DNA evidence but to a series of circumstances the justices said connected him to Stuart’s murder. Witnesses testified that the kitchen knife resembled one kept at the home where Cajuste was living and that one witness had seen the knife in Cajuste’s room shortly before the killing. A downstairs neighbor reported hearing male and female voices arguing around the time of the homicide, while another resident awoke to sounds of a struggle.

The opinion also recounts testimony showing that Cajuste and Viviane Stuart worked together as security guards at the Emerald Beach Resort and remained in contact around the time of her husband’s death. A coworker testified that Cajuste visited Stuart at the resort even when he was not scheduled to work and that she recognized his voice during calls Stuart received on the June 21-22 overnight shift. When Cajuste later appeared for a police interview, according to the opinion, he had a fresh cut on his left arm consistent with a knife wound, gave an account of the injury that conflicted with hospital records, appeared nervous and later left St. Thomas, not returning until his arrest.

The Supreme Court found that the evidence also supported the jury’s finding that the murder was willful, deliberate and premeditated. Stuart sustained seven deep stab wounds to vital areas of his chest, back and neck, and the knife remained embedded in his neck. The justices said the number and nature of the wounds allowed a rational jury to conclude that the assailant had time to consider his actions and consciously decided to kill Stuart.

The lack of forced entry also factored into the court’s analysis. Stuart’s wife had locked the apartment before leaving for work, both sets of household keys were accounted for and investigators found no sign that anyone had broken into the residence. Coupled with testimony that Cajuste possessed a knife resembling the murder weapon beforehand, the court said the evidence supported the conclusion that the killing was the product of planning rather than a spontaneous confrontation.

The court ultimately concluded that there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find Cajuste committed first-degree murder and could therefore be convicted under the territory’s aiding-and-abetting statute, which permits a person who commits, assists, counsels, induces or procures a crime to be punished as a principal. The justices rejected Cajuste’s request for a judgment of acquittal and left his conviction and life-without-parole sentence intact.

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The ruling comes more than two decades after Stuart’s death and four years after the 2022 trial brought the long-running cold case to a jury. At the time of the verdict, the Consortium reported that prosecutors said Cajuste and Viviane Stuart had participated together in causing Stuart’s death and that both were found guilty of first-degree murder under an aiding-and-abetting theory.