Resting her case

At least so I thought. Because I had been feeling quite adrift on reading about reputed “breaches of professional ethics by the attorneys which may have the effect of perverting the course of justice in litigation against the State” and Seetahal’s column was a sturdy commonsense branch onto which I could clasp so I did not drown in a sea of confounding wordiness.

I was grateful to Dana Seetahal because I could not fathom why we were being goaded into emotionality; grateful because I had listened to charges that lawyers who defend the State in civil law claims are representing prisoners in litigation against the State and perplexed, I had wondered, but is this not the practice?

I was grateful to Dana Seetahal because when referring to the former Solicitor General’s allegations of “unethical business ventures”, everyone had tendered into evidence one cut-and-paste job, one among hundreds of complaints against prison officers, and in that matter despite the dishonesty of the witness statement, the question of assessment of injuries and compensation had not been struck out.

So it seemed to me grossly unfair to prisoners and their attorneys the insinuations of a massive conspiracy, a racket which allegedly involved the Office of the Attorney General. The only facts on record were that between September 2005 and May 2012, damages totalling $10.2 million had been paid by the State in several civil lawsuits brought by inmates involving prisons officers accused of violence and that a High Court officer had noted an increasing number of cases of alleged brutality brought against servants of the State. There was no indication that the cases were frivolous or were injudiciously settled or adjudged.

I was grateful to Dana Seetahal because my instincts had led me to media reports about abusive turnkeys, which is where this brouhaha seems to have begun, and in possession of no law degree, I still did not trust what I sensed, which was that perhaps there was no conspiracy at all. You see, I had returned to an August 2013 article by Newsday’s Andre Bagoo, where president of the Prisons Officers Association Ceron Richards objected to a report by Inspector of Prisons Daniel Khan which highlighted instances of prisons officers brutalising inmates. Richards had said he “didn’t like” the report because it gave the impression that “prisons are places housing brutal animals who want to inflict harm on prisoners.”

He then refused to accept any liability on the part of jailers, but rather shifted the blame to the lawyers representing these.

“I think that it is because there is poor representation by the State’s lawyers at the Solicitor General’s Department in terms of the formulation of a proper defence,” Richards said. “We see a lot of cases where I think the officer was correct in executing their duty and yet when those cases go to court we get the opposite result.”

But as Andre noted, Richards “was not able to immediately give specific details” to support his claims and it was noteworthy that during that interview he cast no aspersions on the Office of the Attorney General or on private attorneys.

And I wondered if shifting blame wasn’t what the stink was all about. But as everyone else, I had pondered if something were not amiss when an SG writes to a PM, going over her boss’s head. However, then I noticed that also quite striking was the former SG’s second letter to the PM, in which she said that her intervention was no longer necessary after the PM had referred the matter to the AG. Were the AG the “suspect” surely the former SG would have been dissatisfied, perturbed by the PM’s choice of investigator.

There was also the fact that the former SG said she would have to have the records checked to determine whether in reality, she did send that letter to the PM. It was all so odd.

So I had surmised that if there was indeed a need for an independent investigation, it should be one which did not assume the existence of criminality in high office or incompetence or dishonesty on any lawyer’s part, but one which dispassionately examined the details of and judgment in the hundreds of cases brought by prisoners to see exactly why the prisoners are alleging abuse and why they are winning their matters. In other words, we should not let prison officers or anyone else spin the responsibility for lost or settled cases onto the shoulders of others and we should not conclude that an increase in complaints against the State or in judgments favourable to complainants is corroboration of corruption. Rumour has it that on hearing the news Sunday of Dana Seetahal’s assassination, prisoners cheered. Extraordinary irony really, when the last legal argument the incisive, nonpartisan Senior Counsel would ever make was made essentially on their behalf.

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