WHO WILL REPRESENT THE CAMP STREET 17?

Mar 09, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

An opportunity beckons. An opportunity to enter into the record books! There is the opportunity for some lawyer to write his or her name into Guyana’s legal history by initiating either an individual or class lawsuit against the government for the death of the prisoners.
The possibility that the prison population may have rioted and this led to the fires that killed the seventeen men. The fact that prisoners rioted does not absolve the prison authorities from their obligation to provide a safe environment for the prisoners.
These prisoners had their rights. One of which is the right to life. The State had a responsibility to secure the life of the prisoners under its charge. The argument has been made, but not yet proven, that the State failed in its duty and therefore is liable to be challenged in tort. The seven men suffered a gruesome death. They must have suffered extreme pain and endured tremendous suffering.
The families of the prisoners have been offered a miserly sum of $100,000 each. This has been deemed an ex-gratia payment by the government. It is being given out of a moral rather than a legal obligation. That sum will not be sufficient to cover the funeral expenses of each of the 17 prisoners who died. There is a popular funeral parlour that offers relatively cheap funerals, but even that parlour is going to hard pressed to offer a decent funeral for $100,000.
The government, even as a moral obligation, should have offered to bury each of the seventeen men. This was a human tragedy. The gruesome deaths of these men, the fact that so many died, represented a national tragedy. There has never been a case of so many deaths and injured as happened at the Georgetown Prisons.
Guyana has had three major massacres, but the numbers did not reach seventeen dead and so many injured as was the case with the prisoners. This is one of Guyana’s greatest tragedies, surpassed by only the close to one thousand Americans who died at Jonestown in 1978.
The government is not going to get off lightly with this $100,000 payment to each of the families. It is an insult to the dead and to their grieving families. It makes the PPP look like saints. One thing you can be sure about was that if the PPP was in power and something like that happened, the PPP would have offered to fund the funeral expenses of the family. It would not have been as tight-fisted as this government. As things stand, the government is accumulatively offering far less than it costs them to run off that February 23 parade at Cuffy Square. This is disgraceful.
But all that can change if some smart person decides to sue the government for the loss of life of the prisoners. Then the government will be forced to act to avoid a long and potentially costly litigation.
If the PPP takes up the case, it is likely that the government will move quickly to counter the political capital that the PPP will gain from taking up the interests of the families. The PPP, however, is not likely to take up any case. These men were remand prisoners. Most of those who died were on murder charges. They were not convicted. But notwithstanding, the PPP is not likely to want to be seen as defending the interests, posthumously, of persons on murder charges.
As such, the door is open for private lawyers to take up the interests of the seventeen prisoners, and in the process make a name for themselves in the history books.
This will, however, mean that they have to take an interest in the Commission of Inquiry and be prepared to represent the deceased in that Inquiry.

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WHO WILL REPRESENT THE CAMP STREET 17?

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