Call for code to collar local judges

Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter

In the wake of a United Kingdom Privy Council ruling yesterday that Judge Priya Levers should be removed from the bench in the Cayman Islands for misbehaviour, a call is being made in legal circles for a judicial code of conduct for judges and resident magistrates in Jamaica.

The Privy Council found that Levers, by her misconduct, showed that she was not fit to continue to serve as a judge "and humbly advises Her Majesty that she should be removed from office on the ground of her misbehaviour".

The Jamaican Bar Association in 1996 called for a judicial code of conduct when Chief Justice Lensley Wolfe (now retired) ordered an attorney-at-law, Terrence Williams, to show him his client's instructions while a trial was proceeding in the Home Circuit Court in October 1996.

The chief justice perused the instructions and then showed them to the prosecutor.

Williams was yesterday sworn in as special prosecutor.

In upholding a ruling by a tribunal in the Cayman Islands, the Privy Council said the picture that the evidence painted was of a judge who was given to making derogatory comments about fellow judges to friends and to members of the administrative staff.

The Privy Council reviewed transcripts of some of the cases in which Levers presided and found that she made comments in court which constituted serious misconduct and were inappropriate.

The Privy Council found that Levers' intervention in a sentencing hearing flagrantly violated the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct and showed bias and contempt for Jamaicans. She was also found guilty of serious misconduct in attempting to procure the acquittal of a defendant by improper means, which include comments made in the presence of the jury. The defendant was acquitted.

Globally unacceptable

It was the Privy Council's finding that in some cases, she made offensive and racist comments which the law lords said were "wholly unacceptable from the bench anywhere in the world".

Levers, who is from Sri Lanka, is married to a Jamaican and migrated to Jamaica in 1977 where she practised until she went to the Cayman Islands in 2002 to act as a judge. She was appointed a High Court judge in April 2003.

She was on suspension since 2008, pending the outcome of the complaints against her.

Attorney-at-law Bert Samuels, in response to yesterday's Privy Council ruling, said there was the necessity for a code of conduct for Jamaican judges and resident magistrates. He said a call for a code of conduct should not be viewed as an attack on the judiciary but rather to protect it from falling into disrepute.

Samuels said sanctions for judicial conduct could be in the form of an apology to the offended party; could bar a judge from further promotion; and also compel a judge to give an explanation for his or her conduct.

He said, at present, complaints against judges and resident magistrates are made to the chief justice but there are no codified standards.

Samuels is calling for a judicial code of conduct and committee comprising retired Court of Appeal judges to be appointed to hear complaints and make sanctions.

Director of Public Prosecutions Paula Llewellyn, QC, in commenting on the judge's removal from office, said "It is a wake-up call or timely reminder to all of us in the legal community that when you exercise the function of your office in the public interest, nothing less than the highest standard of professionalism is acceptable to the public."

barbara.gayle@gleanerjm.com