WESTERN BUREAU:
A HIGH Court Judge yesterday ordered that a warrant be issued for the arrest of a 45-year old Hanover minister of religion who failed to show up in the Hanover Circuit Court for his bigamy trial.
Justice David Pitter was not amused at the absence of Arnold Raphael Morgan nor his attorney Dalton Reid, who was said to be attending the Trelawny Circuit Court.
Pastor Morgan who was arrested on a warrant on the night of May 18, 2000, and charged with the offence after being on the run for over a month, is on $50,000 bail.
Pastor Morgan, of the Mystery Lifeline Church in Dias, Hanover, and who resides in Four Paths, St. Elizabeth, reportedly got married three times between the early 1980s and 1998 without having the previous marriages dissolved legally.
The court heard that the minister of religion first got married in the early 1980s to Barbara Carey, of Schoolfield, Santa Cruz, St. Elizabeth; that union produced six sons.
On November 11, 1995, he got married to Janet Dennis, 40,
a teacher of Portmore, St. Catherine; that union produced two children. Three years later, on November 25, 1998, he got married for the third time to Paulette Watson, 39, a cashier of Dias.
The matter was reported to the police by Ms. Watson on April 4, last year after she was told incidentally about her husband's marriages during a conversation with a relative of Pastor Morgan's wife.
At the preliminary hearing which was concluded in January, eight months after it was first brought before the court, evidence was given by the three wives, two of the marriage officers and a photographer at one of the weddings.
