Jamaica Works to Distance Itself From British Justice

Poor, young and idle, Randall Dixon was one of the usual suspects when Det. Cpl. Phillip Gordon ended up dead in a chaotic firefight between four bank robbers and four policemen.

Despite witness testimony that Dixon wasn’t involved in the 1996 Western Union Bank robbery, he was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to die by hanging.

Dixon, now 37, has had his sentence struck down by the Privy Council in London on appeal because videotape from security cameras -- suppressed by police for the last seven years -- proved he wasn’t there.

That might be expected to make Jamaicans question their judicial system, which lawyers and human rights advocates here say is so flawed that courts have repeatedly condemned innocents to the gallows.

Instead, the ruling angered many Jamaicans. They see the high court in faraway London as a vestige of colonial rule trying to impose its anti-death-penalty values on this eye-for-an-eye Caribbean culture.

Politicians have seized on the Privy Council’s “abolitionist” rulings to persuade Jamaicans they need to cut the colonial apron strings and replace the high court of the British Commonwealth with an emerging Caribbean Court of Justice. It is expected to open its main office in Trinidad in November.

Jamaica has signed on to the regional court project in what legal and social analysts say is dismay with one of the world’s most horrific murder rates and high-court rulings that have prevented every planned execution since 1988. Despite the cost and uncertainty about how the multinational Caribbean court will operate, Jamaicans are largely in favor of it because they expect it to carry out more hangings.

“The last polls show about 82% in favor of the death penalty, even though there is no more evidence here than anywhere else that it acts as a deterrent,” said Nancy Anderson, a defense attorney and activist with the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights.

Given the corruption of law enforcement and the national judiciary, she said, Jamaica needs to retain the Privy Council as a safeguard against miscarriages of justice that might get by a novice regional court whose judges might be inexperienced political appointees.

“When your evidence goes against what the police are saying, 95% of the time the courts will find for the police,” said Anderson, who was a member of the defense team for Dixon and a co-defendant tried on a lesser charge.

Jamaica formally embraced the Caribbean Court of Justice in June, when Prime Minister P.J. Patterson made his country the eighth to formally sign on to the regional integration project. The court is expected to adjudicate trade issues and serve as court of last resort for as many as 14 island countries.

Patterson drew Jamaicans to his argument for the court in December, when he called for a resumption of hangings over the objections of the Privy Council and made the threat of execution the cornerstone of a new anti-crime program. Noting the clear majority in favor of capital punishment, Patterson vowed that “we intend to heed the voice of the people.”

It is not just frustration over the Privy Council’s commutation of dozens of death sentences. After four decades of independence from Britain, Jamaicans also resent the residual influence from British institutions.

The decision to join the Caribbean Court of Justice “is clothed in the view that it is finally time to break from Britain and complete the process of decolonization,” said Clinton Hutton, a professor of government at the University of the West Indies in Mona, outside the capital. “Anyone who supports the Privy Council is discredited as having a colonial mentality.”

It may be years before the court is ready to hear appeals from member nations, said Hutton, but Jamaicans are eagerly awaiting what they see as full autonomy in matters of justice.

Jamaica’s small intellectual and legal communities, on the other hand, look askance at the regional court, at least for now, arguing that the money it will need would be better spent at home to reform corrupt law enforcement and upgrade courts.

Jamaica is a poor country with an ailing economy: Most rural judges don’t even have lawbooks, a shortage of stenographers means a trial transcript takes an average of 14 months, and courtrooms are so decrepit that one judge sitting for a hearing recently fell through rotted floorboards.

Yet Jamaica must borrow millions to cover the costs of starting up the court. Jamaica’s foreign debt is already more than 2 1/2 times what its economy puts out every year in goods and services. So some politicians are arguing against joining the court strictly on a financial basis, since the services of the Privy Council are available to former British colonies gratis.

As in the U.S. -- one of the few big industrialized democracies that still executes people -- neither of the dominant political parties here dares take a stand against the death penalty because citizens fiercely adhere to the idea that those who take life should pay with their own.

“It’s a biblical, instinctive notion of an eye for an eye, that one should do unto a murderer as he has done unto the victim,” said Member of Parliament Delroy Chuck, a criminal lawyer and a spokesman for the opposition Jamaican Labor Party.

The party opposes replacing the Privy Council without putting the decision to a referendum. The governing People’s National Party, eager to sate Jamaicans’ thirst for greater autonomy, says it needs only a simple majority in Parliament, which it already has.

The London court’s abolitionist image in Jamaica began a decade ago when it commuted death sentences for two convicted murderers, Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan. Noting that the two had spent 14 years on death row, hearing the gallows being hammered together for their hanging just hours before three stays of execution, the Privy Council judged their treatment “cruel and unusual punishment” and ruled that anyone on death row longer than five years was automatically eligible for commutation.

With Jamaican courts in such decrepitude, not one of the hundreds of death penalty appeals has been settled within that time frame. Forty-two inmates remain on death row, and most are likely to see their sentences changed to life in prison because of the appeals backlog.

Most people concede Jamaica has a crime problem, even if they’re split over what to do about it.

Jamaica has the world’s highest level of “extrajudicial killings” by police, according to the human rights group Amnesty International: Last year, police shot to death 133 Jamaicans, many of them already handcuffed, accounting for more than 10% of the year’s 1,045 killings. In the last decade, 1,500 Jamaicans have been killed by police -- in a population of just 2.5 million.

Decades of miscarried justice emboldened neighborhood gang bosses, “dons” enriched by the drug trade. They have their own security forces and hold sway in the urban fiefdoms where police fear to tread. Turf battles and reprisal slayings have turned cities like Kingston, Spanish Town, May Pen and Mandeville into perilous places where anyone can become a victim.

Alicia Henry’s common-law husband, Denzil Davidson, was shot in the face at point-blank range in September as he was opening his fried chicken takeout stand in the violent Grants Pen neighborhood of Kingston. The shop, on the border of two rival drug dons’ territories, was the first place gunmen went looking to shoot the first person they found on a rival gangster’s turf after an attack on one of their own the night before.

“He wasn’t involved with the dons. He was no criminal, just a hard-working man with his own business,” said Henry, who said she had to send the three young children she had with Davidson to live with their grandmother in the countryside because she could not afford to feed them.

Like most urban Jamaicans traumatized by the crime wave, Henry says a regional court would be more inclined toward hanging and that capital punishment would deter murders.

The distraught 26-year-old, recently laid off from her printing plant job, said she would like to see Davidson’s killers hanged for their crime. But witnesses are too afraid to stand up to the gang bosses, and police won’t get involved with what they see as a gangland matter, she said.

The failings of Jamaican law enforcement are traditional, said Carolyn Gomes, head of the police watchdog group Jamaicans for Justice.

“The Jamaica Constabulary Force was established to protect the elite from the masses, and it has never really changed itself from a paramilitary to a civilian police force,” she said.

The case of Randall Dixon, the man falsely accused of murder in the Western Union Bank robbery, is hardly unique. Accusations of police brutality in extracting confessions, suppression of evidence and intimidation of witnesses surface so routinely that even government officials concede they have to clean up the cops.

One special “crime-management unit,” whose leader called himself Saddam, was implicated in several execution-style killings. It was recently disbanded, but its members remain part of the 8,500-strong Jamaica Constabulary Force.

“That’s how Jamaican justice works. You have all the rights, but the police ignore them,” Dixon’s brother, Mark, said, recalling the volumes of contradictory testimony and evidence discarded by the local court in favor of the unsubstantiated version presented by two colleagues of the dead policeman.

The Jamaican Appeals Court, meanwhile, has given the police a year to decide whether to reopen their investigation. So, despite the Privy Council ruling, Dixon remains in jail.