Perverting the course of Justice

Jul 05, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News- Guyanese will remember the case of Robert Simels, the lawyer of convicted drug trafficker, Shaheed Roger Khan. Simels was convicted and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for witness tampering – one of the offences associated with perverting the course of justice.
It was alleged during his trial that Simels attempted to influence someone to pressure certain witnesses. The person whom he was alleged to have tried to have someone induce a witness to give false evidence. That person turned out to be a government mole and was recording him. The recording of their conversation sealed his fate during his trial for witnessing tampering.
Two days before he was sentenced Simels went to the graveside of his parents. He knew what was coming. He was saying goodbye to his deceased parents because he did not know whether he would ever get out of prison – perverting the course of justice carries the maximum offence of life imprisonment.
Simels admitted that what he did destroyed him. In Court he told the judge, “Whatever self-esteem I had, whatever self-worth I had has been destroyed by this process. I am responsible for where I stand.”
Attempting to pervert the course of justice is a serious offence. Justice Ashurst once said, “It seems to me that a greater offence can hardly be that of obstructing or perverting the course of justice.” And Justice Groje added that if “it is laid down in some cases that an attempt to persuade another not to give evidence in a case of justice is indictable, then it cannot be doubted … that an attempt to mislead the court by misrepresentation is equally criminal.”
According to Blackstone, perverting the course of justice occurs where a person or persons acts or embarks upon a course of conduct which has a tendency to and is intended to pervert the course of public justice.”
A range of offences are concerned with perverting the course of the justice. These include giving a false identity to an investigating rank such as when you are stopped by the police for riding a bicycle without lights and the police is writing you a ticket on the spot and you tell him your name is John X when in fact it is Peter Y.
Perverting the course of justice occurs when evidence is willfully destroyed or hidden, obstructing the police in their work, assisting persons to avoid arrest, lying to the police about what you saw or was doing at the time of an incident or taking the rap for someone so as to prevent that person from being prosecuted. Perverting the course of justice also occurs when persons concoct or give false evidence.
Perverting the course of justice can occur even in the case of traffic cases, as was the case one week ago when a man in Bradford, England was convicted, He was being investigated for a series of traffic accidents but told investigators that he had sold the vehicle since 2018. This turned out not to be so.
In another case this week, two persons, a man and a woman, were sentenced to jail for attempting to intimidate witnesses in a murder case and tampering with CCTV footage. The man was sentenced to prison for three years six months and the woman to two years five months of imprisonment.
No one is immune from prosecution, as the case of Constance Biscoe, a barrister, illustrates. She was sent to prison for 16 months for allegedly misleading the police in a traffic case involving someone else.
As the assistant District Attorney noted in the Simels case, perverting the course of justice was an affront to the system of justice. In fact, it is an affront to public order. The system of justice is organised to ensure public order – a condition necessary for the maintenance of society.
The system of justice is also based, in part, on providing penalties for those who commit wrongs. If those persons benefit from false testimonies, then justice will be undermined and the guilty allowed to walk scot-free. This is why the courts take such a strong stance against attempts to pervert the course of justice and why the maximum penalty is life imprisonment, and why convictions almost always result in jail time.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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Perverting the course of Justice

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