Malahoo Forte In Judge Brown’s Court A Sign Our Flawed Democracy Is Working

In our Parliamentary demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem of Government, as is the case in west­ern repub­li­can democ­ra­cies, it is crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant that the checks and bal­ances which obtains holds, and are strength­ened if our demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions and our nations are to survive.
As cit­i­zens, all of us have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to stick our hand in the prover­bial dike when­ev­er we see a breach, every­thing depends on it.

Last Wednesday High Court Judge jus­tice Glen Brown urged the Government to pay the attor­neys rep­re­sent­ing Corporal Kevin Adams and six oth­er police offi­cers charged with mur­der in the case pejo­ra­tive­ly dubbed the death squad case.
Justice Brown inti­mat­ed that he would be giv­ing the Government over the week­end to deal with the 107 mil­lion dol­lars owed to the offi­cer’s attor­neys, a lit­tle fact which has ham­pered the case’s progress.

Listen to com­men­tary here.

Two events occurred as a result of jus­tice Brown’s threats to dismiss.
(1) The nation’s Justice Minister Delroy Chuck was out­raged, he labeled the judge “out of order” while insist­ing that the sum owed was out­ra­geous and extravagant.
Chuch went as far as to sug­gest that the gov­ern­ment only agreed to help with the offi­cer’s legal fees not bear the full extent of those costs.
Remember this is the very same Delroy Chuck who was a part of the admin­is­tra­tion of Bruce Golding which gave the Island INDECOM. Yet the learned attorney[sic] nev­er thought it pru­dent to have monies includ­ed to defend cops charged by INDECOM, what­ev­er hap­pened to the pre­sump­tion of innocence.
There is one lit­tle fact in all of this, and that is that the Government is com­mit­ted to pay­ing the legal fees of offi­cers charged by INDECOM.
This was not a part of the orig­i­nal frame­work of the law, it came into effect after struc­tur­al defi­cien­cies have been found in the eight-year-old law.
This writer has been on the tip of this spear, yelling at and to every­one who will lis­ten, at the clear uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the law and the ways it is infring­ing on the rights of the Island’s officers.

(2) Despite Chuck’s grand­stand­ing and argu­ments for a sys­tem of men rather than a sys­tem of laws, he found him­self meet­ing with the offi­cer’s attor­neys and resolv­ing the out­stand­ing issue.
We can look at Chuck’s expe­di­tious con­for­mi­ty with what the judge sug­gest­ed and extrap­o­late from it that(a)he gave in because he knew the monies had to be paid. Or (b) I rather argue that he made arrange­ments to pay because he was adamant that these offi­cers were not going to walk free.
We all know how much Delroy Chuck loves the police[sic]

So Chuck did not find him­self answer­ing to the court per­son­al­ly but Malahoo-Forte the Attorney General did.
The fact that any­one from the exec­u­tive was forced to show up and answer to anoth­er branch of Government is a step in the right direc­tion and a clear indi­ca­tion that flawed though our democ­ra­cy is, we are still on the right path toward a soci­ety of laws and not of men.