Defence wants Cuban light bulb case thrown out

BY PAUL HENRY Observer staff reporter henryp@jamaicaobserver.com

LAWYERS for former junior energy minister Kern Spencer and his co-accused Coleen Wright are asking the court to throw out the corruption trial against their clients in light of what they say are inconsistencies in statements by the Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Llewellyn and the senior investigators in the matter.

The attorneys -- Queen's Counsels KD Knight and Patrick Atkinson -- argued before Senior Corporate Area Magistrate Judith Pusey yesterday that the case should be dismissed as the inconsistencies guaranteed that the accused persons will not get a fair trial, to which they are constitutionally due.

KNIGHT... the effect of the prosecutorial misconduct is that the accused cannot get a fair trial

Knight, in making his submission for the case to be thrown out against his client Wright, said the occurrence, in essence, was a plot to deceive.

"I don't know how to describe this but it it's a tiny web being woven," said Knight. Knight had begun his submission by characterising the episode as "obfuscating" and "circumvention".

The episode to which Knight referred is the revelation last week by Llewellyn in a letter of disclose to the defence about her meeting in 2008 with then Cuban light bulb accused Rodney Chin, who is now the Crown's main witness.

In the letter of disclosure on October 7, Llewellyn said when she met with Chin in the latter part of 2008 Chin at the time never gave a statement to the police. This latest position is in contradiction to the one she had maintained since April when it slipped from Chin during cross examination that Llewellyn had met with him at his lawyer's office. Llewellyn had always maintained that she spoke to Chin within the parameter of the statement he gave the police before they met.

Lead investigator, Fitz Bailey gave an original statement in April saying that the statement existed at the time Llewellyn met with Chin in his and the presence of others. But in follow-up statements, the latest being this month, Bailey said it was a type error when he said that the meeting was in October 2008. He said the meeting took place in November and that the statement was not in existence at the time.

Yesterday, Knight and Atkinson made heavy weather of what they say were discrepancies in the statement and questioned why it took so long for Llewellyn, Bailey and the other police investigator and lawyers from the Office of the DPP to correct the so-called error.

"If that isn't prosecutorial misconduct I don't know what is: where the lead prosecutor has presented a number of inconsistent positions on the same issue -- some orally to the court in submission, some written to the court as submission, some written in letter to the defence and some presented in the Supreme Court," Knight said.

"The effect of the prosecutorial misconduct is that the accused cannot get a fair trial and the matter should be dismissed at this stage," added Knight, who quoted the 2001 Privy Counsel ruling in the case of Barry Victor Randall v The Queen, where Randall's fraud conviction was overturned due to the conduct of the prosecutor in the trial.

For his part, Atkinson, who represents Spencer, said it was "reckless" for Llewellyn to have the meeting with Chin, without recording what was said. But especially reckless, he said, was Llewellyn's failure to inform the defence of the meeting. Atkinson, who is to continue his submission on Thursday, also blasted Bailey and the others who gave statements previously without a mention of the meeting.

Union wants investigation into death of Jamaican farm workers

JDF Coast Guard catches 50 illegal Honduran fisherman

Close that Gorge!

No shoddy work under JDIP!