Lawyers only want to protect judges

Former Senator and Senior Counsel Martin Daly yesterday described as a “dangerous precedent” the Chief Justice “pre-emptive strike” — which has prevented the police from arresting him.

Saying that he could well understand the frustration of the Commissioner of Police, Daly, speaking on morning television, stated, “I don’t know how you are going to explain to the ordinary man in the street how, if the police want to charge him or they (the police) are outside his door, how the ordinary man gets privileged access to the court to make a pre-emptive strike against the arrest warrant.”

He said while the country may be evenly divided on the issue, 50 percent would want to know “if the police comes to arrest me can I go to the court at odd hours or on a weekend and get that stopped? I think we have created a dangerous precedent there, and not enough persons were discussing it.” Daly also stated that he thought the court was making “one huge mistake” by dealing with all the injunctions on an ex parte basis.

Daly said it had to be decided whether once someone holds the office of a judge and they have the protection of Section 137 of the Constitution whether you can move against them in any other way.

“I happen to think that you can. But I think one needs to be careful,” he said. He added that he thought there was an area of “danger” in attempting to run parallel cases against a judge in relating to things that are happening in the performance of his duties.

He said he did not accept that Section 137 amounted to a “complete insulation.”

“If, for example, a judge driving on the Priority blind drunk, ran off the road and killed four people, and there were many witnesses, I would find it difficult to say that the only penalty he would face is proceedings under Section 137,” he said. But he said the lawyers would have to think very carefully if he can be prosecuted when the charge arises out of the same facts that affect the performance of his duties.

“Nobody is thinking this thing through. Everybody is either carrying out their professional engagement, they have some agenda, the Law Association is consistently beating only one drum — the protection of the judges-, completely blind to the concern of the man in the street about privileged access to justice,” Daly stated. “Indeed, the whole case with the Chief Justice started with allegations about privileged access to justice,” he noted.

He criticised the fact that the first judicial review proceedings have laid fallow for 15 months. He said this ball started with a series of conversations between the CJ and the DPP, and the content of those conversations would tell whether the conversations were benign or sinister.

He said this was the subject of judicial review proceedings which “for all the wrong reasons” have laid there for 15 months. Meanwhile the whole thing has escalated and made us the laughing stock of the world,” he said.

“My recommendation is that everything should go into cold storage. And that first judicial review proceedings — the judge should call all the lawyers in and say ‘during this long vacation here, we are trying this case from start to finish, decision on the first day of the law term, and then we could go to the Court of Appeal, and the Privy Council after that.’

“Because that first proceeding would tell you, who did what, what was benign and what was sinister,” Daly stated.

He said the issue of the interference in the Naraynsingh case was the “key” to the whole thing.

“The thing started there and it must end there,” he said, adding that if it turned out that the CJ had done absolutely wrong, then obviously all these other proceedings would be looked at in the same way. The State stymied itself. The State should have insisted that those proceedings be expeditiously heard. For whatever reason, both parties agreed to go to mediation. All we kept hearing was ‘the matter is in mediation,” he said, adding that the mediators should have been given a maximum time of three months.

He also questioned whether a matter like that, once it gets into the public debate was suitable for mediation. “Because you never know the facts. Everything is dished up behind closed doors,” Daly noted.

Noting that the CJ’s argument was that because the State’s first attempt to remove him from office had failed that it created these new charges, Daly said it was therefore more important to address the original complaint against Sharma (ie interference in the Naraynsingh case).

“Very interesting persons are on affidavit,” he said, citing Justices Hamel-Smith and Stanley John, the DPP, the AG, and the PM. He said under cross-examination by good lawyers, “we should know who is telling the truth and who is pushing a hidden agenda.”