Kim Johnson, Guardian TT

Two stories caught my eye in the Sunday Guardian a fortnight ago.

I didn't read them, eyes swivelling left and right as if before a Chinese ping pong match, words pouring into my head.

I scanned the headlines. Then I unfocused my gaze to encompass the entire page, top, bottom, left and right.

In that exercise a few words or phrases scattered at random jump out at me from the grey mass. Usually they are enough to let me know what the story's about and if I want to bother with the left-right, left-right business of scanning.
In this case I didn't.

Normally, my lack of short-term memory would immediately erase all knowledge of what I'd seen. But these two particular stories, one following the other by about two minutes, were related and their combined impact left a mark.

Maybe, I thought days later, there's something there worth considering.

The first story – actually the only one, because the other was an opinion column – told of some English lawyers saying that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) will be a hanging court.

That is, the court was established only so that West Indian governments could hang condemned criminals.

That's not quite so. It was established so that governments could hang people in their own time, and without having to speed up the system of appeals as they did with the Dole Chadee gang.

But the general point is correct. When the Privy Council disputed that any treatment was good enough for condemned men, that even they had rights, governments in the region began searching for ways to replace the Privy Council.

Who cares? I don't care what English lawyers think about the Caribbean, which is why the story didn't grab my interest.

Too besides, hanging is a political issue. If we have politicians who stupidly believe that social breakdown could be halted by breaking a few necks, then we have a problem which must be dealt with politically.

I don't refer to our Trini politicians. They don't believe in anything.
Basdeo Panday and Ramesh Maharaj were against hanging before they won power, and for it after they did.

As for Patrick Manning, and the PNM in general, they have no belief so much as an attitude that change in any sphere must always be resisted, preferably by remaining as still as possible.
No, the stupidity I refer to is that of Jamaica's politicians.

For 35 years politicians bought guns, gave them to the most degraded, depraved men they could scrape out of the Kingston gutter, and paid them to go shoot up the other side.

And now they want to stop the whirlwind they sowed, by setting up a Caribbean Court of Appeal which will hang a few men.
Boy, if the ones really behind the killing were hanged, they wouldn't come from Trenchtown.

But I digress.

Returning to the CCJ: its most articulate advocates point out that we are independent. As Nehru said in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, “Yes, we will make mistakes, but they will be our mistakes.”

A simple, forceful, compelling argument. But wait: are we indeed independent? Here, whenever government wants desperately to nail someone to the cross, they bring down an Englishman.

Panday imported Englishmen to fight Abu Bakr and Dole Chadee. He even imported one to contest Patrick Manning's constitutional motion.

And the horrendous incompetence of Manning's local lawyers seemed to vindicate Panday.

Now Manning has brought an Englishman to get Panday.

We have English laws, and English lawyers, so why not English judges?
It's a difficult question to answer. You can only prefer our national mistakes, which is what many of our judges amount to, mistakes, when you're not personally their victim.

God forbid I find myself before one of them, which is what brings me to Dana Sitahal's opinion column.

On a quick scan I sensed rather than saw that Dana was complaining about the Court of Appeal's dismissal of several magisterial appeals. They had not been filed with the clerk within the mandatory seven days after conviction.

Actually, the appeals weren't dismissed. The court decided that there were no appeals to either uphold or dismiss because they'd been filed late.

Michael de la Bastide made that decision a few years ago, and that was that. Hands washed clean of the mess. Every other judge followed suit.

No matter the prisoners signed their forms promptly, and the late filing was entirely the Prisons Service's fault.

People might think that one ought not to lose sleep over the wrongs done to jailbirds. But every one of those men are going to win hefty damages on a constitutional motion. And they are going to be filed some time this week.

They have been denied their legal right of appeal, that is the due process of law, and must be compensated. The Judges of Appeal all know that but still they pretended that they couldn't hear the appeals which were filed late.
“My hands are tied,” said de la Bastide. But it wasn't his hands that were tied.

Because it doesn't stop there. Instead it gets absurd: a constitutional motion can win you damages, but it can't release a convicted prisoner.

So these men will be paid for having been denied an appeal, but they will also continue to serve their sentences?

I won't get into Dana's specific points about section this and sub-section that. I prefer the simple fact that judges have a discretion which allows them to prevent clear miscarriages of justice.

Furthermore, they are obliged to interpret the Constitution to that it overrides all other laws.

Do they? Instead we get decisions from the highest court staffed by locals, which are totally absurd. These semi-literate judgments make nonsense of the Constitution and perpetuate inefficiency and injustice.

And when these judges staff our Caribbean Court of Appeal, what will it be like?

It will be brainless, cowardly, unimaginative, lacking in compassion, and possess neither a sense of legal philosophy nor justice.