Tobago prisoner gets 10 strokes too many

A TOBAGO man is to be paid $20,000 by the State for excessive whippings he received at Carrera Island Prison. Instead of receiving ten strokes as ordered by a Judge during sentencing, the prisoner was given 20 strokes across his buttocks.

Yesterday, Justice Peter Jamadar ordered the State to pay Don Cox $2,000 for each extra stroke prison authorities inflicted on him on May 9, 1996.  Justice Stanley John had sentenced Cox and another man in the Scarborough Criminal Assizes to ten years imprisonment each, and ordered that they both be inflicted with ten strokes “each,” for the charges of  robbery and wounding. Carrera prison authorities apparently misunderstood this sentence to mean that Cox should have been whipped 20 times. He was so whipped, contrary to the original sentence of Justice John. Cox filed a constitutional motion seeking compensation for the administering of the excessive sentence. When Justice John passed sentence, he told the two men, “In addition, I do not feel both of you are too young to be flogged, having regard to the fact that offensive weapons were used in the commission of this offence. I propose to order a flogging for both of you. Each of you, in addition to the term of ten years imprisonment on count one will, receive  ten strokes each.”

Cox stated in his motion, filed by attorney Sunil Gopaul Gosine, that on the morning of May 9, 1996, prison Superintendent Roget told him that he was to receive 20 strokes. Cox stated in the affidavit that he protested and reminded Roget of the judge’s sentence of only ten strokes. “The Superintendent then informed the applicant that as far as he was concerned, he (Cox) was to receive 20 strokes,” Cox stated in his motion. Cox stated that he was examined by a doctor that morning, stripped of his pants and handcuffed to a bench. His waist and feet were strapped down and his head was covered with a piece of cloth. “I heard Roget started counting from one to 20 and I receive 20 strokes on my buttocks,” Cox stated in the motion. Cox added that he groaned in pain during the beating and that the pain was so intense with each successive stroke, he almost fainted. When the case came up before Justice Jamadar in the First Civil Court, San Fernando, attorneys for the State consented that Cox was flogged in excess of his sentence. In ordering that $20,000 be paid for the ten extra strokes, Justice Jamadar jokingly remarked that perhaps a precedent had been created in which a stroke can be quantified at $2,000.