Juman Yassin’s letter collapses under its own logic

Jan 04, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Mr. K.A. Juman-Yassin S.C. wrote a recent letter to the Stabroek News, entitled, “In the absence of any other information, I have come to the conclusion that a plan was hatched by the gov’t to have Justice Cummings-Edwards removed as Chancellor.”

The letter is framed as a sober, dispassionate intervention by a senior member of the legal profession concerned with the rule of law. In substance, however, it is, in my considered opinion, an object lesson in how conjecture and inverted logic can be dressed up as constitutional concern and presented as near-fact.

The letter does not merely speculate. It constructs a serious allegation of possible interference while implicitly making an invitation for this allegation to be disproved. This alone is fatal to the letter’s credibility.

At the heart of the letter is the thesis – never proven, never supported by direct evidence—that Acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings-Edwards may have been forced or enticed into pre-retirement leave by the government. This is not a minor assertion. It opens the door to speculation about possible political interference in the judiciary, one of the gravest suggestions that can be made in a constitutional democracy.

Yet the author offers no documentary proof, no testimony, no statement from Justice Cummings-Edwards herself, and no act attributable to the Executive that compels such a conclusion. Instead, he relies on what he calls “reasonable conclusion.”

Labeling a claim, a “reasonable conclusion” does not make it logically valid. In formal logic, a conclusion is reasonable only if it follows necessarily or probabilistically from established premises. Where the premises are unproven, incomplete, or speculative, the conclusion—however confidently expressed—has no logical force.

Also, circumstance is not causation. This means that the mere existence of surrounding facts or events does not establish that one caused another. Things happening around an event do not necessarily explain why the event happened. Context may raise questions, but only evidence can answer them. This is a reminder that coincidence, timing, and surrounding facts do not equal proof of cause.

The letter treats the lack of a public explanation by Justice Cummings-Edwards not as a neutral fact, but as affirmative support for the thesis that she was pressured.  This is a classic logical fallacy.

A classical logical fallacy is based on the assumption that a claim is true because it has not been proven false. In other words, it treats the absence of evidence as evidence itself

Worse still, the author acknowledges that he does not know when Justice Cummings-Edwards was due to retire, how long she had left in service, or why she chose pre-retirement leave—yet proceeds to speculate about possible coercion anyway.

Most troubling is the letter’s wholesale inversion of the burden of proof. The author openly declares that he has drawn conclusions and that “if I am wrong, then I will apologize.”

In law, the accuser bears the burden, not the accused. Yet here the government is implicitly required to prove that it did not force a judicial officer to demit office. This reversal of first principles is especially jarring.

The same inverted logic infects the discussion of Justice Navindra Singh’s acting appointment and the episode involving office access. From a single incident—reported in a newspaper—the author leaps to an elaborate theory of possible prior instruction. direction. He insists that Justice Singh “would never, never” have remained in the office unless instructed to do so. This is pure speculation.

The author substitutes his personal belief about what a judge would or would not do for actual evidence of what was done or ordered. Courts do not operate on “the only reasonable conclusion”; they operate on proof.

Equally flawed is the suggestion concerning the view about the bypassing Justice of Appeal Rishi Persaud.  But the letter writer needs to be reminded that custom is not always law. Long-standing practice, tradition, or habit does not automatically acquire legal force, especially where there is a written constitution or statute that governs the matter. Custom may inform the law, but it does not override it

Furthermore, past practice does not constitutionalize entitlement. Article 127 (2) allows the President, subject to consultation, the discretion to make acting appointments. And this discretion does not mandate seniority. To argue otherwise is to elevate convention into veto power.

In the end, the letter implicitly invites the public to accept as fact what the author concedes he cannot prove, and then implicitly challenges the government to disprove a claim that was never properly established. That is not vigilance in defence of the rule of law. It is its distortion.

(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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• Chancellor, Juman Yassin, Justice Cummings-Edwards, Peeping Tom

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