REGARDING THIS ONGOING VYBES KARTEL TRIAL

The process of Justice in Jamaica does not have many cheer-lead­ers. In fact it seem at times that the only dyed-in-the-wool believ­ers were the police, until many of them stopped believ­ing. That was when the you now what hit the prover­bial fan. The crim­i­nal Justice sys­tem and crim­i­nal lawyers have now giv­en new mean­ing to those two terms. Many peo­ple talk about police cor­rup­tion with­out under­stand­ing the rea­sons police depart­ments are over­come by cor­rup­tion. What nev­er ceas­es to amaze me in crim­i­nal tri­als is the absolute bias the press shows toward crim­i­nals. Defense lawyers are placed on pedestals some of them have no busi­ness being on. They do this while poor­ly paid pros­e­cu­tors and Police work­ing on behalf of the peo­ple, are cast as dis­hon­est, less than moral­ly-upright peo­ple of char­ac­ter. That is the imagery which greets young Jamaicans start­ing to form opin­ions about life dur­ing the for­ma­tive years. Is it any won­der then that Dons are revered and Cops are regaled?

As a young offi­cer I loved the Courts, I loved to tan­gle with the high and mighty Legal-Eagles, I rec­og­nized pret­ty ear­ly, that many were noth­ing more than school-yard bul­lies dressed in suits. There are decent Lawyers ‚a lawyer has a duty to defend his/​her client in the best way he/​she knows how. Yet a defense lawyer is an offi­cer of the Court. That means a he/​she has a pro­pi­tia­to­ry duty to the inter­est of jus­tice, not just an acquit­tal for his/​her client. How many lawyers can say they have been guardian of that trust? There are more than enough doc­u­ment­ed case of lawyers step­ping over the line in the inter­est of mon­ey, basi­cal­ly act­ing as crim­i­nal concierges , not just to tilt the scales in their clients favor but actu­al­ly dis­tort­ing and per­vert­ing the course of jus­tice. Many of those sup­posed legal lumi­nar­ies were more than eager to cut a deal when they real­ized cer­tain detec­tives were involved in their clien­t’s case. The Vybes Kartel mur­der tri­al is no dif­fer­ent than any oth­er mur­der tri­al in Jamaica, all the cheer-lead­ing is for the crim­i­nal accused, no one cares about the process. A Police wit­ness Corporal Sean Brown tes­ti­fy­ing for the pros­e­cu­tion told the court that he did not go through all of the text mes­sages of Vybes Kartel.

Defence attor­ney Pierre Rodgers accused Brown, who is assigned to the Crime Forensic Unit of the Organised Crime Investigation Division, of being unfair and unjust. Rodgers charged that Brown’s incom­plete perusal of the phone data obtained from telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Digicel was unprofessional.“Wouldn’t jus­tice and fair­ness dic­tate that you go through all the data?” Rodgers asked.http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Defence-lawyers-grill-cop-in-Vybz-Kartel-trial-_15809857

Brown admit­ted that he had used key words such as ‘mur­der’, ‘killing’, ‘Kartel’ and ‘Lizard’, to nar­row down the pool of text mes­sages and call records he pro­vid­ed to the court as evidence.“That formed the basis of the analy­sis,” Brown said. But Rodgers would have none of it. He cit­ed two cel­lu­lar calls that were made with­in a sec­ond of each oth­er on a phone alleged­ly used by Kartel but were made from cell cites at the Norman Manley International Airport and Acadia in upper St Andrew. This infor­ma­tion was not giv­en to the court as evi­dence, Rodgers claimed. “Wouldn’t fair­ness and jus­tice dic­tate that you go through all the data?” he asked. Rodgers had ear­li­er accused Brown of con­coct­ing a text mes­sage said to be sent by the alleged vic­tim, Clive ‘Lizard’ Williams, to his girl­friend Onieka Jackson, in an effort to fab­ri­cate a case against the accused men.

I am proud of this offi­cer and the evi­dence he gave, this Attorney has show just how unpre­pared he is to the point he resorts to what they always do, char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion. This offi­cer had no oblig­a­tion to go through every text mes­sage for this pur­pose, this accused most like­ly has tens of thou­sands of mes­sages both sent and received , This offi­cer must have been trained to use key-words to nar­row his search. Had he gone fur­ther the alle­ga­tions would have been one of per­son­al rights violation.Whatever oth­er evi­dence may have been gleaned from access­ing the remain­der of his text mes­sages may have no pro­ba­tive val­ue as far as this court is con­cerned but may poten­tial­ly be a gold-mine going for­ward for inves­ti­ga­tors. It would be wise if some of the vil­lage lawyers with no idea what they are talk­ing about ‚would just calm down and await the out­come of this tri­al. There will be time enough for them to go off on their irra­tional rants, arsenic bile foam­ing from their mouths about police incom­pe­tence. A lit­tle knowl­edge can be a dan­ger­ous thing.