THE EDITOR, Madam:
For most people, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) is indeed an inaccessible umpire as Daniel Thwaites says (16 February 2001). The fact that legal aid is not available for Jamaicans to pursue their right of appeal to their highest court is, of course, a disgrace. But since the Government has not said whether this will be rectified should the CCJ replace the Privy Council, no one can be sure how much more accessible -- if at all -- it will be.
We must also take issue with Mr Thwaites' attempts to trivialise the JCPC's role in death penalty cases. Any observer of the Privy Council knows the Law Lords are not a liberal bunch by any stretch of the imagination. They do not routinely overturn death sentences. Just ask the 10 men who were hanged in 1999 in Trinidad and Tobago! Indeed, the Privy Council's scope is so limited that the majority of cases are not even granted leave to appeal. But it has on occasions prevented tragic miscarriages of justice.
Just one example is the case of two Jamaicans whose case was remitted to the Court of Appeal and who were freed in 1998 when the only prosecution witness was found to have lied. These innocent men had already been issued with execution warrants and would have been hanged had it not been for the Privy Council's intervention. It was lucky for them that the English sponsors (lawyers) Mr Thwaites speaks of rather sneeringly did indeed rush to their rescue.
In 1999 a case from Trinidad and Tobago obliged the Law Lords to recommend that defence lawyers in capital cases should take written instructions from their clients and keep notes of any meetings with them. This was as a result of the revelation that one legal aid attorney -- and this was probably not an isolated case -- did not have any such records. That this situation had arisen when a man was on trial for his life is beyond belief.
One Law Lord has been moved to comment thus -- the stark fact is that often the cases have been inadequately investigated by prosecution and defence alike and sometimes the quality of the representation of the defendants in the Caribbean courts leaves much to be desired.
For Mr Thwaites to talk glibly and selectively about what he perceives to be frivolous appeals is to ignore serious shortcomings in the criminal justice system that can lead to conviction -- and death -- of the innocent. Surely, even as a supporter of the death penalty, he would concede that only the highest standards of justice will suffice?
Strange too that he and others should be so anxious to cast off the colonial vestige of the Privy Council yet are desperate to hold on to another. And that, of course, is hanging.
I am etc.,
SHELAGH SIMMONS
E-mail: simmons@carib-justice.freeserve.co.uk
Southsea, Hampshire
England
Via Go-Jamaica
