Events similar to crucifixion of Christ

In welcoming new judge Larry Lalla to the bench yesterday, Justice Herbert Volney urged him to “fear not the pen of the uninformed and thoughts of idle rhetoric of the ignorant whose exhortations may be likened to the events leading up to the crucifixion of Christ.” When villified and derided for exposing the correct and the proper, Volney told Justice Lalla “take consolation of the lives of John the Baptist, Christ, Lord Krishna, Prophet Muhammed, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, all of whom lived in the principles of the righteous, suffered for it and made the ultimate sacrifice in the just cause.”

Volney, who has been at the centre of controversial decisions, waxed warm as he told Lalla to rise above the displeasure in the “unbridled use of the resources of the State to abuse the processes of the court in order to intimidate the Judiciary and its judges.” He urged Lalla to learn that independence on the Bench is not found in the structures of the Constitution, but in the fibre of the judge’s conviction to render true justice irrespective of the consequences. Volney said the day of the honourable, of honour and of principle in the ways of man is well into decline. “This is the age of the threatening, the bully and the all powerful in which all that is good is under the fire of the ungodly,” he said, and told Lalla that every decision he makes will be microscopically analysed by armchair critics.

The special sitting took place in a packed Port-of-Spain Fifth Criminal Court, where several attorneys including two silks — Alvin Fitzpatrick SC and Israel Khan SC — paid tribute to Lalla. Fitzpatrick recalled the early days of Lalla when he started off his career in his chambers, and hoped he had the additional quality of having tough alligator skin to ward off attacks by the Press. Volney said earlier this week that he was a bobolee, but had an alligator’s thick skin. Also congratulating Lalla were Om Lalla on behalf of the Criminal Bar Association and prosecutor Nalini Singh on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions. However, there seemed to have been a faux pas when Volney ended the special sitting without allowing Lalla to respond.