An English court overturned the murder conviction of New Yorker William Labrador Monday and barred prosecutors from retrying him. In its ruling, the court cited the unreliable testimony of a prison informant who claims Labrador confessed to drowning a Connecticut woman.

The ruling in London by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council made Labrador, 39, a free man late Monday afternoon. Labrador had been held in a hilltop prison on the British Virgin Island of Tortola ever since the Jan. 15, 2000, murder of Lois McMillen.

Upon his release from Her Majesty's Prison at Balsam Ghut just before 6 p.m., Labrador hugged his mother, told reporters he was looking to get on with his life, took a dip in the ocean and had dinner at a local hotel. He is scheduled to fly home to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday.

"It's time to go live my life again, which thank God was not taken from me," Labrador told the Associated Press.

"He's coming home! He's coming home!" Labrador's mother, Barbara Labrador of Long Island, told Courttv.com when reached by telephone earlier in the day. "No retrial. That's it. Period. He's out."

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the highest court for appeals arising from British-dependent territories in the Caribbean, has the last word in the matter. Its ruling effectively ends the prosecution of Labrador for McMillen's murder and those of two friends charged with attempting to cover up the crime.

Jeffrey Plante

The only witness to provide any direct evidence during the men's five-week trial in 2001 was Labrador's cellmate, 61-year-old Jeffrey Plante of Texas. Plante, a convicted swindler whose criminal record stretches back to 1964, testified that Labrador got religious before Easter in 2000 and confessed to drowning McMillen when an argument over money escalated to violence.

"It would be hard to imagine a witness who was less deserving of belief than Jeffrey Plante," the five-judge panel wrote in its 38-page ruling.

"We won. We won on everything," said London barrister Edward Fitzgerald, who handled Labrador's appeal for free after hearing about Plante's background.

The court agreed with the defense's chief contention during a three-day hearing in February. The trial judge erred, Fitzgerald argued then, by failing to explicitly caution Labrador's nine-member jury that prison informants like Plante inherently have motives to help prosecutors make cases against other inmates.

Josephine McMillen, Lois McMillen's mother, said Monday that the ruling does not come as a surprise based on what she heard at the hearing in London. The judges, by their questions and statements, seemed to be tipping their hand, she said.

"There's nothing we can do. We are very disappointed," McMillen said. "It doesn't change our mind about anything ... None of them have gotten off scot free, but I don't think three years and a couple of months is enough."

McMillen, who splits her time between homes in Middlebury, Conn., and Tortola, said she and her husband, retired manufacturing executive Russell McMillen, found Plante's testimony credible when they heard it first at a pretrial hearing in 2000 and again during the trial in 2001.  

Murder in paradise

Lois McMillen, an attractive 34-year-old painter and former model, was well-known on Tortola from her family's annual vacations there over 20 years. In the days leading up to her death, she spent time with Labrador, Michael Spicer of Virginia, Alexander Benedetto of New York and Evan George of Oregon.  

Lois McMillen

After spending a day shopping with her mother on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. John, McMillen headed out alone to listen to a blues band perform at the Jolly Roger Inn on Tortola. That same night, the four men said that, after they stopped at a bank machine not far from the Jolly Roger, they dropped Labrador off at an intersection.  

Labrador testified that he changed his mind about going to a bar in Cane Garden Bay and walked home, where he spent the rest of the night alone watching television.  

McMillen's parents spent a restless night waiting for Lois McMillen to arrive home. They called police at about 10 a.m., fearing that she had been in an accident somewhere on the mountainous island and was unable to summon help. A short time earlier, a passerby had told police that a body of a woman was lying on the rocks along the shore of Sir Francis Drake Channel.

Within hours, Labrador and his friends were being held for questioning based on the fact that their shoes were wet and sandy and Labrador had a cut on the bridge of his nose. During the trial, a police evidence technician testified that the shoes were not wet when he collected him.  

At the insistence of the defense, the trial judge ordered the evidence technician to develop film from a camera seized from the men. The photos were taken before the murder. A blowup of several of the images showed what appeared to be a sun blister on the bridge of Labrador's nose.  

"Thank God for the Privy Council. I immediately got on my knees and thanked God," Barbara Labrador said. "William had such faith in the job [the defense lawyers] did and so do I. It was awesome."  

'A compulsive liar'

The Judicial Committee also granted a motion by Benedetto to reinstate his acquittal. Although the trial judge dismissed a murder charge against the 36-year-old son of a New York book publisher, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeals ruled last year that jurors should have been allowed to decide Benedetto's guilt or innocence based on Plante's testimony.

Plante testified that Benedetto and Labrador fought often in prison. At one point, Benedetto accused Labrador of being "more guilty" than he was. Benedetto maintains that the statement had to do with $350,000 he and Labrador borrowed from Benedetto's father to start a business together.

"I am very pleased that after almost three and a half years justice has finally been served for us, but it hasn't been served for Lois," Benedetto said. "We still don't know who killed her. I think they should reopen the case."

Benedetto said he cannot believe that prosecutors would go to trial with nothing more than the words of their accuser, Plante, whom he called a "monster" who has "screwed over" everyone he has ever met.

In the ruling, which was written by Lord Hope of Craighead, the justices had a few choice words about Plante as well.

"Their Lordships have concluded that no value whatever can be attached to Plante's evidence. He has been shown to be a compulsive liar," Lord Hope wrote. "His evidence is so lacking in credibility as to make it impossible to regard any conviction on his evidence alone as safe ... In light of what is now known about Plante and all the defects that have been revealed about the content of his evidence their Lordships are in no doubt that it would be wholly contrary to the interests of justice for Labrador to have to face a new trial based, as it would have to be, wholly on Plante's evidence."

Prosecutors did not returns calls seeking comment. After the trial, Plante was extradited back to Texas to serve out more than 30 years remaining on a 45-year sentence imposed in 1987 for grand larceny.