Supreme Court orders judge to take action on abandoned cases

The V.I. Supreme Court has ordered a lower court judge to take action in two cases that have been languishing for years.

The first case involves prisoner Patrick Riley, convicted of the 1990 murder of Samuel Bing Joseph, who was shot to death in front of his three-year-old son. Riley has been fighting to overturn his conviction, arguing that he had ineffective assistance of counsel at trial, and filed a petition for a writ of habeus corpus in 2019.

Prosecutors did not file a response, and Superior Court Judge Kathleen Mackay was assigned to the case, but did not issue any orders or rulings for more than a year. Riley asked the Supreme Court to take action a year later, and he has been waiting for something to happen ever since, according to court records. After Riley filed the mandamus petition with the Supreme Court, Mackay “still did not issue any orders at all in the habeus corpus case,” according to an opinion filed by the Supreme Court on Aug. 29.