CORRUPT CHIEF MAGISTRATE AND THE PRIVY COUNCIL

“HOPELESSLY compromised” the Privy Council once described then-Trinidad and Tobago Chief Magistrate Sherman McNicholls.

The British law lords said McNicholls was guilty of “reprehensible conduct” and that “his mind must have been in turmoil” for a 2008 fraud case against senior operatives of a previous Basdeo Panday-led Government.

McNicholls had earlier sought – and received – assistance from then-Attorney General John Jeremie in a personal land transaction matter.

“It is not difficult to imagine his gratitude,” the Privy Council commented.

In quick order, McNicholls convicted Panday on another matter – failure to disclose a British bank account – and sentenced him to a maximum two years behind bars.

The Privy Council raised “legitimate doubt” about the Chief Magistrate’s “ability to act as a wholly independent and impartial judge.”

The Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) launched a probe into McNicholls’ conduct, but the top jurist did not give evidence to the investigators.

McNicholls died in 2012, at age 57, a poster child of duplicity and prejudice in senior judicial office.

Through the years, the local judiciary has had other “vindictive people and people who have political axe to grind,” according to Panday.

In 2003, Panday identified a couple of such jurists, whom, he claimed, were in cahoots with respective PNM administrations to “pervert the course of justice at the highest possible level.”

Several other names have been bandied about by practitioners in politics and law.

That remains core of the sustained objection to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as T&T’s final appellate legal forum.

Personal, business, political and educational ties in a small, tightly-knitted society could compromise the dispensation of justice, according to critics.

The arguments in favour of the CCJ are obvious – that the jurists are more familiar with the region’s constitutions and culture, and that T&T must inevitably cut links with its former colonial masters.

Further, the cost of jurisprudence in London is costlier than in a Caricom capital. 

But the McNicholls example remains a burning instance of jurists peddling their authority for dubious personal benefit.

That, course, is not an indictment against the CCJ as an organisation.

And no judge of the regional body has been smeared.

Indeed, the CCJ is a powerful symbol of the Caribbean moving the cut the colonial umbilical cord/

It is also inevitable that T&T would eventually manage its legal affairs.

But Panday argued that this must be done within the framework of constitutional reform, which would provide checks and balances on power.

Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar has advocated that the matter be resolved through a national referendum.

Others have said that the Privy Council law lords are more learned and experienced than regional jurists.

A decade ago, Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s then-Opposition Leader and current Prime Minister, said: “One of our greatest assets is that our final court is an internationally recognised court of arbitration and appeal, and we want to take ourselves from it.”

Others have insisted that the ethnic, geographic and class composition of CCJ’s judges are not representative of the society it serves.

“Politicians are appointing judges,” one commentator said about the recurring hot potato.

Defenders of the institution say there is no difference in the process of naming local jurists.

For as long as T&T declines to make the CCJ the final appellate court, it will remain a raw and relevant issue.

So, too, would be the Sherman McNicholls perversion of the course of justice.