The jurors in the McKeeva Bush rape trial have retired to begin their verdict deliberations.
The jury of four women and three men have spent more than a week listening to evidence, as well as the closing arguments by prosecution and defence counsel, and a summing up of the case by Justice Roy Jones.
The case against Bush was brought after a woman, now in her early 50s, accused the former premier of raping her more than two decades ago.
She has alleged that the veteran politician raped and indecently assaulted her on an unspecified date, sometime between 1 Jan. 1999 and 31 Dec. 2001, when she drove him from a George Town bar to his home in West Bay.
The woman, who testified on Monday last week, told the court that the assault occurred after she turned down a dark road, off of West Bay Road, where, she said, he had non-consensual intercourse and oral sex with her.
Bush, who took the stand on Thursday, emphatically denied the accusations, insisting he’d only met the woman once, when he claims she accosted him on the steps of the then Legislative Assembly, to criticise him for giving residency rights to Jamaicans and Hondurans.
He has denied attending a gathering at the Sea Inn Bar at which the woman said she met him and from where she drove him home. She had testified that the gathering had been to celebrate an early milestone in Sir Alden McLaughlin’s political career.
Bush insisted to the jury that he would never had attended such an occasion, that McLaughlin belonged to a rival political party.
During the trial, the jurors also heard from a number of witnesses who testified via Zoom from the United States that the woman had told them – at varying times dating from 2010 to 2021 – of being raped by a prominent person in the Cayman Islands.
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