Grand Court of the Cayman Islands, Criminal Division — R v Devon Emmanuel Wright
Jonas Hankin KC has concluded a four-week trial in the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands arising from the death of Alissady Azalea Powell, who was two years and nine months old when she disappeared from her home on the remote island of Cayman Brac in the early hours of 26 July 2022. The trial ran from 20 July to 14 August 2026, when the jury returned its verdicts, acquitting the defendant of murder but convicting him of abduction.
The child’s body was recovered later the same morning from the ‘ironshore’ some 0.6 miles from the apartment where she had been sleeping. The death was initially recorded as a drowning. It was only after fresh pathological material emerged that the case was re-examined, and a series of specialist reports in forensic pathology, neuropathology, paediatric radiology, and cardiovascular pathology established that the child had not drowned at all, and that the most likely mechanism of death was compression of the neck.
Jonas was instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2025 to review the papers and advise whether any person should be charged with any offence. His advice of 11 June 2025 concluded that there was sufficient evidence to charge Devon Wright with murder and, critically, recommended that a count of abduction be added in the alternative, foreseeing that a jury might be sure that Mr Wright abducted the child from the apartment but not sure that he did so for the purpose of enabling or aiding another person to commit the offence of murder. The DPP adopted that recommendation in full. It proved to be the decisive drafting decision in the case: on an indictment charging murder alone, the trial would have resulted in a complete acquittal.
The prosecution case was wholly circumstantial. There was no eyewitness, no admission, no established motive and no scientific evidence identifying the person responsible. The Crown’s case was instead built from the pathology, the physical characteristics of the apartment and its single locked door, the hydrographic evidence excluding tidal movement of the body, the absence of injury to the child’s bare feet, and a detailed reconstruction of the movements of everyone in the building that night. Jonas led the prosecution throughout, from advice on charge to closing speech, assisted by junior counsel Martin Mulgrew. Stan Reiz KC and Katie Williams appeared for the defendant.
The principal difficulty confronting the Crown was not the complexity of the science but the fact that, for close to two years, the death was not investigated as a homicide at all. The first post-mortem recorded the cause of death as drowning. The working hypothesis adopted by police was that the child had drowned in the swimming pool at the apartment complex and that her body had afterwards been moved. It was only in April 2023, when an independently commissioned forensic report concluded that she had not drowned, that the matter was taken up as a killing.
The consequence was that the ordinary first steps of a murder investigation were never taken. The apartment was not examined as a homicide scene. Forensic recovery, the securing of digital and telephone material, the identification and questioning of those in the vicinity, and the accounts taken from those present in the building were all approached on the footing that no crime of violence had been committed. A video doorbell had gone missing from a neighbouring unit and was later recovered from the shoreline; by the time its significance was appreciated, it was no longer possible to access any footage that may have been recorded. Lines of enquiry that should and would have been open to the police to pursue, and which would in the ordinary course have strengthened the Crown’s case, were foreclosed by the passage of time before anyone thought to pursue them. The case that came before the jury in 2026 was necessarily built from what had survived that delay.
The defendant awaits sentence.
Man cleared of murder but found guilty of abduction of toddler – Cayman Compass
