I must comment on the immoderate attack on the Court of Appeal that appeared in another newspaper last week. Apparently it was a report of an interview that Mr Maurice Glinton gave in a radio interview on the preceding Sunday. The banner heading of the newspaper is the “Appeals Court ‘Indicted'”.
The headline is based on the report of the interview when “Mr Glinton agreed that he was indicting the Court of Appeal and the whole of the judicial system.”
The interview related apparently to the two recent decisions of the Privy Council in one of which their Lordships held that the mandatory imposition of the death penalty was unconstitutional; and the other where the Privy Council reinstated an appeal in the Court of Appeal and criticised the Court of Appeal for dismissing an appeal too readily with its justification that the appeal (unargued) was unlikely to succeed.
What I write in no way detracts from the importance of those two Privy Council decisions. I am grateful for the latter decision because I have myself suffered from that type of refusal to hear an appeal and the Privy Council’s decision means that those gratuitous comments about the worthlessness of the appeal carry no judicial weight whatsoever.
However Mr Glinton’s immoderate criticisms of the Court of Appeal are sufficiently well known that when he appeared for me professionally before the Court of Appeal in the matter I later refer to his advice to me was that having submitted his written submissions he would not address the Court at all.
I was startled at first by that suggestion because my committal to Fox Hill Prison was sought by the other side, but on reflection I agreed and my opponents brought out an English silk who proceeded to dig his own grave by his extreme position. I must be the only litigant who has won two appeals in the Court of Appeal whose Counsel, by agreement, never opened his mouth.
Mr Glinton’s reported criticism of the Court are that the Court of Appeal does not take its role seriously; that their Judgments are on a “weekly basis”, meaning that the Judgments are delivered too soon after the hearing of argument, so “they would not have had time to study the issues”.
Practitioners will remember that Dame Joan Sawyer, the President of the Court of Appeal, when she was Chief Justice, with the support of the Bar led a crusade against the delays in the court system on the basis that “justice delayed was justice denied.” Mr Glinton will know that a Judgment that is delayed when it appears is inevitably a flawed judgment and immeasurably worse than a judgment produced in a timely fashion, and which can be appealed.
If Mr Glinton points to the Privy Council overruling the Court of Appeal or criticising the Court of Appeal then that is, after all, the system at work. That is why the Court of Appeal hears appeals from the Supreme Court and the Privy Council hears final appeals from the Court of Appeal. Mr Glinton says we deserve better. I think we are lucky that the Privy Council is there where necessary to correct the decisions in the Court of Appeal, and some would deny us that protection.
Mr Glinton does not refer to the cases where the Privy Council upholds the decisions of the Court of Appeal. The issue is one where Mr Glinton and I are far apart.
As Mr Glinton knows I was acting as Attorney and Counsel for employee defendants in a series of cases and I objected to pressure being brought on my clients to give false evidence. Subsequently with false evidence I was attacked both by a gagging Injunction action and to prevent me receiving my fees.
When the Court of Appeal allowed the Appeal I have referred to in 2005 I came free of the injunction order and able to investigate why I had been subjected to that conduct.
I have presented to the Attorney-General and to the Ethics Committee of the Bahamas Bar a detailed Complaint, involving what I consider improper conduct by some senior attorneys to pervert the course of justice in this jurisdiction. Lawyers in other jurisdictions were involved.
Those engaged in impropriety were on the point of success when the matter was appealed to the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal was clearly attentive and alert to what was going on and in a relatively short and succinct Judgement delivered without delay the Court of Appeal scotched the efforts of those who were abusing the process in the courts below.
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I mention this because in my Complaint I mention that an astute Court of Appeal, which twice refuted the false claim to secrecy that the wrongdoers were securing in the Supreme Court, and which Court of Appeal immediately gave full public notice of its judgments on its web-site, enabled me to investigate the wrongdoing that had occurred to me and others.
Because a decisive Court of Appeal brought these extensive improprieties effectively to an end. I would have no agreement with Mr Glinton about the seriousness with which the Court of Appeal attends to the business before it.
The issue now is of investigating appropriately the conduct of those senior lawyers involved in accordance with the statutory procedures in place under the Legal Profession Act and if appropriate, subjecting them to disciplinary measures and by that method to teach a lesson to any lawyers in the Bahamas and elsewhere who would emulate them. We deserve better but we deserve better from a few senior lawyers and from a Bar Council that is conscious of its statutory duties as well as its privileges.
I know Maurice Glinton well and I know that fundamentally he is deeply and honestly concerned with constitutional and human rights violations. I have no difficulty with that. All lawyers should be ever watchful for such violations.
I am senior enough to remember when Sir Leonard Knowles, as Chief Justice, introduced the apparently innocuous administrative rule that all interlocutory matters (that is – non final trial hearings) should be made on application by Summons and not on Motion.
That had the effect of turning most interlocutory matters into “chambers” matters heard in camera where the public and accordingly the press were not entitled to be present. That simple change swept away the common law general rule that the administration of justice was generally to be conducted in public.
In my view the interests of the public as to the administration of justice and possible shortcomings by the Judiciary and the Bar, would best be served by the above rule being changed back and for the media to be free to report fully what is going on in the courts.
Lionel Levine, LLB
Nassau, Bahamas
