The Privy Council has refused to hear an appeal by a woman convicted of hiring her half-brother to murder her former boyfriend.

Katrina Burgess, together with Cleveland Rogers, was found guilty of the murder in October 26 of Marcus Gibbings.

Burgess had sought permission from the Privy Council to hear her case after the Court of Appeal upheld her conviction.

In a decision dated November 30, the council refused to hear the case on the grounds that there was “no risk that a serious miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.

Mr Gibbings was found dead in a pool of blood in an apartment on Derwent Lane, Devonshire, on October 26, 2006.

A post-mortem examination revealed that he had suffered multiple stab wounds, including one to his face and two to his chest, one of which hit his heart.

Prosecutors at the pair’s Supreme Court trial alleged that Burgess had paid Rogers $5,000 to kill Mr Gibbings after he cheated on her and ended their relationship.

The trial heard evidence from two witnesses — former girlfriends of Rogers — who testified that he had confessed to the murder.

One said Rogers had told her that he had waited behind a couch and ambushed Mr Gibbings when he walked into the apartment.

Neither told police about the confessions until 2018, when Rogers was behind bars for an unrelated conviction for unlawful carnal knowledge of a 13-year-old girl.

The Supreme Court jury found Rogers and Burgess guilty of premeditated murder after five hours of deliberation and the pair were sentenced to serve at least 25 years in jail.

In 2021, Rogers and Burgess argued in the Court of Appeal that their conviction should be overturned, arguing that the jury had been rushed to deliver a verdict.

They argued that a juror told Marc Daniels, a lawyer involved in the trial, that several members of the jury reversed their decisions to avoid the need to stay overnight in a hotel.

The Court of Appeal ruled that the juror’s comments — and those of the jury foreman, who was interviewed about them — were inadmissible.

Sir Christopher Clarke, the appeal court president, said: “Evidence produced only after the verdict of the jury has been given is inherently susceptible to inaccurate or warped recollection, which may be fashioned by a particular juror’s viewpoint.

“Further, the process of determining what view, in the end, the jury actually took of the evidence is fraught with difficulty and may well have differed from juror to juror.

“This is exemplified in the present case by the acute differences between the evidence of Mr Daniels’ juror and the foreperson and by the multiple questions to which the foreperson’s testimony gives rise both for her and the other 11 members of the jury.”

The pair also claimed that the cases should have been tried separately because the “confession evidence” against Rogers would taint the case against Burgess.

However, Justice of Appeal Maurice Kay said in a written judgment that the decision of Puisne Judge Charles-Etta Simmons to refuse separate trials was “unimpeachable”.

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