Woman free as manslaughter charge dropped

Joan Bennett, the woman on trial for fatally stabbing her common-law husband, is tonight a free woman. The fifty-two year sanitation worker, who had been charged with manslaughter, appeared this afternoon in Magistrate’s Court where prosecutor Cheryl-Lynn Branker-Tait read a memo from the Director of Public Prosecutions requesting that the case be withdrawn. The charges against Bennett arose from an incident on March seventeenth of this year when she stabbed Sebastian Ortiz in his leg at the couple’s home on Police Street. He later bled to death after running from the house. Bennett had testified that she and Ortiz were in an argument when he punched her, threatened to kill her, threw her to the ground and began choking her. She said that when she stabbed him it was only to make him let go of her and she never meant to hurt him so badly.