Historic justice for Sikh man murdered in Scotland in 1998
Thursday, 06/10/2016
http://paper.hindustantimes.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
LONDON: In a widely followed murder retrial in Scotland, a court on Wednesday convicted a man for the 1998 murder of Sikh waiter Surjit Singh Chhokar, 17 years after the accused was first tried and acquitted.
Ronnie Coulter was found guilty by the high court in Glasgow of fatally stabbing 32-year-old Chhokar in Overtown, North Lanarkshire, in November 1998 after a row over a £100 cheque. The retrial followed a change in the double jeopardy law in 2012.
Coulter now faces a mandatory life term. It was only the second time in Scottish legal history that an accused has been tried twice for the same crime.
Two prosecution cases failed in 1999 and 2000, leading to a public outcry. The case was reopened four years ago after a lengthy campaign for justice by Chhokar’s family. One of two official inquiries found the prosecution and the police were guilty of institutional racism.
The then lord advocate, Colin Boyd, admitted that the system had failed Chhokar’s family. During the retrial, the jury heard that Coulter, his nephew Andrew and another man, David Montgomery, went to see Chhokar on the night he died following a row over a stolen Giro cheque.
The three men confronted the waiter in the street as he returned home from work with a takeaway meal. After an altercation, the father of two collapsed and died of massive blood loss after being stabbed three times.
