MR. JUSTICE Ira Rowe, a former president of the Jamaican Court of Appeal, died in the Turks and Caicos Islands yesterday at the age of 75 years.
Friends of the family told The Gleaner that he had gone to the Turks and Caicos to hear Appeal Court cases as part of a panel, starting this week, but yesterday he was found dead in his hotel room.
He had attended a dinner on Saturday night.
He is survived by his two children, David, professor of Law at the University of Miami, and Dr. Patricia Rowe-King, professor of Medicine at the University of Florida, and three grandchildren. His wife, Audrey Yvonne (nee Stewart), died a few years ago.
Justice Rowe retired as president of the Jamaican Court of Appeal in 1993 and went to live in Florida in the following year. He had been a judge of the Court of Appeal from 1979.
An old boy of Munro College, Potsdam, St. Elizabeth, he taught primary school from 1946-47. He read law at Lincoln's Inn, London, England, qualifying as a barrister-at-law. He served as an assistant clerk, then later deputy clerk in the RM Court, and was clerk of courts from 1958-1962.
He acted as Resident Magistrate for Trelawny in July 1962 and was appointed Crown Counsel in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions later that year.
He served as legal attache in the Jamaican High Commission in London from 1962-65, after which he returned to Jamaica and was appointed assistant attorney-general.
From 1967-69 he acted as solicitor-general.
He served as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies and was a delegate to the 20th and 21st sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. He served as a judge of the Supreme Court from 1969-77, after which he acted as a Judge of the Court of Appeal.
