A Guyana Tragedy: Magistrates Nurse and Lovell and Commissioner Brumell

Feb 19, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In a column last week on Magistrate Clive Nurse, I did say that I would write the Chancellor on this magistrate’s ruling to jail two police ranks for two years for allowing a prisoner to escape. My opinion is that this sentence is highly flawed and needs investigating. My second opinion is that human rights groups should demand the dismissal of Magistrate Nurse.
Even more untenable is the position of Magistrate Sueanna Lovell. Ms. Lovell jailed an Amerindian teenager, Fatima Martin, for sixty months (the maximum sentence for such a charge) for assaulting the offspring of Magistrate Geeta Chandan and her husband attorney, Joel Edmond, while on babysitting duties.
The case went through the court within the space of a week. The teen was legally unrepresented and a probation report was not submitted. The teen was also a first offender. No matter how we are enraged by the babysitter’s action, the dispensation of justice must not be wild and irrational.
There are troubling aspects about this case. One is that a magistrate jailed a babysitter on the complaint of another magistrate. One may say there is a conflict of interest there. But this conflict of interest may become more visible when you take into consideration the complaints of Red Thread, the Women Miners’ Organisation and the Amerindian People’s Association.
These important national stakeholders have told the media that they are in vehement disagreement with the severity of the sentence. They staged a picket outside the Convention Centre while the Caribbean Court of Justice was in session. I participated, and I would urge more of our menfolk to come out and protest Magistrate Lovell’s misplaced decision. I would urge my fellow male gender to join these women groups in further protest action against Magistrate Lovell.
Secondly, the role of the police and the courts come into focus. The police were quick to charge. The courts were in a supersonic mood to proceed. The case lasted a week in a court system that is one of the slowest in the world – Guyana. As soon as I heard about this quick conviction, I thought of Mr. Jagdeo’s libel writ against me and this newspaper.
The affidavit by Mr Jagdeo was filed at the end of September 2010. The court case began in July the next year. That would be ten months. I swear on my parents’ grave, a sitting judge said to me. “Freddie, you better check it; that may be a record for the world, not only Guyana.” Indeed he was right! A libel writ does not see a courtroom anywhere in the world ten months after the plaintiff files an affidavit.
Go to Magistrate Lovell’s courtroom today or tomorrow or the next week and you will see what transpires in all courts in Guyana – an inevitable fast-forwarding of cases to a future date which take in at least a two weeks interregnum. Could a valid criticism be made against Commissioner Brumell for the way his junior ranks behaved in this situation? How long did the investigation take? Was the woman put under severe duress during interrogation?
Let’s return to Sueanna Lovell and Clive Nurse and maybe the acting Chief Justice, Ian Chang. If society does not speak out against judicial decisions that appear to violate natural law, and denounce rulings that appear to have been made in unreasonable and unconscionable ways, then there will continue to be a plethora of egregiously unjust sentencing at both the magisterial and High Court levels.
The willingness to openly disagree with contorted judicial decisions was given phenomenal encouragement when many eminent stakeholders came out in public disagreement with the ruling on the Chief Justice on then Commissioner Henry Greene, in relation to the legal right of the DPP to charge him for rape. So reverberating was the condemnation of this ruling that even a Cabinet Minister critiqued the judgement, and this prompted the Chief Justice to say that in the light of ministerial wrath, he may resign.
Now still echoing all over the media are the rejections of the judgement of the Chief Justice in the budget cutting case. Citizens, seeing that many judicial rulings are being openly questioned in the press, will now feel inclined to be brave and show their disgust with what they considered heartless sentencing by some magistrates. We have seen this with Magistrate Nurse and now Lovell. In my opinion, Nurse and Lovell are not magisterial material and ought to be let go.
But they will be retained because, “we shaart ah magistrates in de country, so yuh gat to tek wuh yuh get.” Look what Guyana gets!

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A Guyana Tragedy: Magistrates Nurse and Lovell and Commissioner Brumell

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