South Magistrate: Courthouse too hot

ACTING Senior Magistrate Ramraj Harripersad, presiding in the San Fernando Magistrates’ Petty Civil Court, whipped out a thermometer in open court and measured the temperature. It read 97 degrees Fahrenheit. An intolerable heat level, Harripersad told Newsday, that he and his magisterial colleagues can no longer bear. The act of taking the temperature reading demonstrated the magistrate’s frustration of working under trying conditions in a courthouse that now faces closure by the Health Department of the San Fernando City Corporation. Harripersad, president of the Magistrates’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT), welcomed the 28-day ultimatum given by the corporation for repairs to, or closure of, the courthouse.

Magistrates will meet to decide their own course of action, Harripersad said, and to discuss the conditions under which they work. On Monday, Harripersad, presiding in sweltering heat, told his attorneys at the bar table that his courtroom was “an incubating cubicle.” In a statement yesterday, the association’s president told Newsday that cockroaches abound, even in the refrigerators that magistrates and staff use. “Sometimes when I take up the telephone, a cockroach runs out,” Harripersad said. Worse yet, he added, magistrates who sit in chambers to conduct adoption and custody cases,  confront cockroaches on a daily basis.

The building houses five courtrooms and the magistrates presiding there are Deputy Chief Mark Wellington, Sonia Aleong, Rajendra Rambachan and Amina Deonarinsingh. Harripersad said that $2.5 million was spent by Government for rental of two buildings to temporarily relocate the courts. “Heads would’ve rolled if that happened in some other place,” Harripersad said, stressing that the two buildings paid for had been unoccupied for the past year. The MATT president said that magistrates have aired their frustration with Chief Justice Sat Sharma, the Assembly of Southern Lawyers, ASPs Desmond Lambert and Dennis Graham.