By Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
PROSECUTORS IN the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) will continue their industrial action until Government officials meet with them and give an undertaking as to how soon the recommendations of the Muirhead Committee will be implemented.
The sick-out by the prosecutors which enters its third day today has led to the Circuit Courts islandwide being shut down.
Prisoners will continue to languish in custody because the cases which were set for trial this week had to be put off. Cases in the Home Circuit Court, downtown Kingston, were put off until Thursday.
Mr. Justice Donald McIntosh, who presided in one of the courts, told the jurors who turned out in large numbers to return on Thursday when "hopefully" the prosecutors will recover from what caused them to be absent since Monday.
"We have decided to continue day by day until the Government or the Public Service Commission (PSC) meet with us and say how soon they plan to resolve the issues", one of the prosecutors said yesterday.
"The public is not aware of the extent of the frustration and intimidation we face at the office,", another added.
Of the industrial action taken by the prosecutors, Director of Public Prosecu-tions Kent Pantry Q.C. said: "I find that (the sick-out) quite improper based on the fact that the law does not allow that and also that the level of persons would be persons that ought to be acting more responsibly than that."
INDUSTRIAL ACTION
He was speaking on RJR's Hotline radio programme. He added that Monday seemed to be quite unprecedented because I noticed that senior staff members, including deputy directors have gone on industrial action."
He said his suspicion was that the action taken by his office staff was based on the "hijacking of several members of staff" to support one individual who has been trying to undermine him since he first took office in 1998.
However, the prosecutors are adamant they have not done anything illegal. They charge that they are merely exercising their legal rights to get justice. Said one prosecutor: "We are ministers of justice and at the same time we have to resort to this recourse to get justice."
SIGNATURES
On Sunday, 23 of the 29 prosecutors in the DPP's office affixed their signatures to a press release outlining their grouses. The prosecutors said one of the recommendations by the Muirhead Committee was that prosecutors acting in clear vacancies should be appointed. The prosecutors say there are 14 clear vacancies in the department and it takes less than a week to have someone appointed to a post.
In November last year the PSC ordered a probe into the administrative functions of the Office of the DPP. The Muirhead Committee conducted a probe into the matter and handed down its recommendations in February of this year.
