EDITORIAL - RM's clarification needs clarification

Senior Magistrate Judith Pusey, we believe, knows and accepts, as much as anyone, the maxim that justice is no cloistered virtue and that the actions of the court cannot be beyond question, or even reproach.

In that regard, Ms Pusey will appreciate our belief that she owes the public an explanation of what many will interpret to have been her about-turn in the judicial review case brought by the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Ms Paula Llewellyn, and our invitation that she address the matter at the resumption of the Kern Spencer corruption case, if not earlier. She might, perhaps, even find it useful to convene a special sitting to deal specifically with this issue before getting back into the cut and thrust of the substantive trial.

The matter at hand is whether Magistrate Pusey "ordered" or "invited" DPP Llewellyn to produce and present to the defence her notes of a meeting with Mr Rodney Chin, a Crown witness against Mr Spencer, the former junior energy minister accused of converting to his own benefit energy-saving light bulbs that were meant to be gifts to the Jamaican people.

Mr Spencer and an assistant, Coleen Wright, and, initially, Mr Chin were also accused of bilking the Government of millions of dollars by establishing dummy companies with contracts to handle the distribution of the bulbs. The DPP, however, dropped the charges against Mr Chin, who then surfaced as a witness.

Defence lawyers had argued that they were entitled to the notes which Mr Chin said he saw Ms Llewellyn making when she, and others, met with him while he was still an accused person.

After days of heated arguments between the prosecution and defence, Magistrate Pusey, in an April 20 session that ended in a stormy exchange between herself and Ms Llewellyn, appeared to have reaffirmed definitively a position she had arrived at earlier.

With the DPP failing to present a document in the form the magistrate expected and seemingly stalling on the matter, Ms Pusey warned of "obstruction of justice" and declared the issue to be a serious matter, "which is why I am prepared to be so indulgent".

"I don't want when anything happens later down the road, people say they never had enough time," she said. She also branded the DPP's behaviour as appearing to be "just an attempt to circumvent the ruling that I made".

Fairness doctrine

Days earlier, the magistrate had raised the fairness doctrine and had advised the court that "the authorities from other jurisdictions, which are persuasive, suggest that if no note or memorandum in writing was created, then a written account should be presented".

Mr Spencer's attorneys were in no doubt there was a ruling, which one of them, Mr Patrick Atkinson, declared "a major victory for fairness".

Ms Llewellyn challenged the magistrate's right to make such a ruling. At the judicial review this week, the justices noted that Magistrate Pusey had issued no formal order and that at one point in the April 20 hearing, Magistrate Pusey's comment to the DPP was that "I invite you to give a statement".

Magistrate Pusey, asked for clarity, reported through her attorney that she had actually issued an invitation, rather than an order. This clarification, we feel, needs to be clarified.

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