By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Dec. 9, 2020: A 37-year-old man has become Trinidad and Tobago’s first registered sex offender after he was convicted of six counts of having sex with a female under the age of 14.
High Court Justice Hayden St. Clair-Douglas on Wednesday ordered Everton Joseph register at the police station in his district as a sex offender.
But that will come seven days after he first serves a nine-year prison term. His name will then remain on the register for 10 years and he must report annually.
Joseph had been convicted by a jury in February. The Court was told that Joseph and the girl had sex between February and June 2009. She was 12 the first time and she became pregnant. She dropped out of school in form one and had a daughter.
She returned to school and progressed to form two but became pregnant again and dropped out for good.
In her victim impact statement, which the judge read out as he began his sentencing, the girl said, “I never completed school as a result of having my kids at a young age. I had my daughter at the age of 13. I was then a form one student, after giving birth went back to school, advanced to form two, (and) got pregnant again with my son. I was 14. I never returned after having my son.”
Justice St Clair-Douglas said Joseph had ruined the girl’s life, noting “these are not the words of a young female in some isolated plantation in a rural Trinidad in the 1940s. This is Trinidad in a residential urban community in the 21st century. This is unacceptable.”
“A 24-year-old man should have recognized he was dealing with a child, a precocious child, and should have spurned her attentions. The law protects young precocious girls from themselves. You were older and supposed to know better,” Justice St Clair-Douglas said.
