The jury of non-partisan public opinion

Apr 04, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

Reference is made to the writings titled “The position I took in these two cases are neither different nor contradictory” and “Clarifying the misconception” (SN and KN respectively, April 3). I make rare exception due to the stalwart one involved, and pen the following thoughts.

First, I must confess that I did not read beyond the captions and reference to me, but it is my belief that the Hon Attorney General, Mr. Anil Nandlall staked out his position in scintillating terms worthy of a Senior Counsel and lawmaker, regarding where I stood in the Carvil Duncan and Paul Slowe (et al) matters. There can be no greater homage from me than to stipulate to his media submissions. I am sure that the erudite AG waxed impressively with a multi-thousand-wordoration, replete with authoritative citations, profound quotations, and scholarly legal dissertations. Whatever he wrote, I thank him for his time, and courtesies I am certain that are incorporated in his epistolary extravaganza. I know the man, the practitioner, and the performer all too well; perhaps, more than comforts him. It is likely that what I identified, which he objects to as being neither different nor contradictory, eludes him in the essences of persistent local trauma, resulting in the AG’s flair for melodrama. For there are these other ingredients for the perspicacious and sagacious AG to consider, and which undoubtedly ought to be most familiar to him. Because whatever he advocated, I table these two tiny cautionary reminders.

For, second, the AG knows that many an illustrious presentation delivered with dazzling rhetorical skill, persuasive courtroom postures to match, and media representations to bolster, have turned out to come up short, and for the simple reason that a jury found against. For some reasoning known only to its deliberating members, what panels of jurors from time to time have come up with results is the equivalent of: how could that be? How on earth, and by what stretch of imagination, intellect, or reason, that after all those arguments presented, all those briefs filed, and all those precedents and authorities paraded, that there is the desolation of failure and defeat? I don’t know what the AG wrote under those two media captions, but I am inclined to think that he trotted out some or all of what I just identified. It is his wont to do so in certain circumstances. Circumstances of before when he was for and circumstances now, when he is not.

Third, for though not of a routine criminal nature, when a jury sits in judgment, there is the probity of peers. I use that jury illustration, so often a bone of contentiousness, to extrapolate into the jury of public consideration. In raw, oozing, partisan Guyana, some will applaud the AG for whatever he placed in the public domain; another segment-disbelieving, even unhearing, probably hostile-may be from the jeering section in the Guyanese community. They see and feel and smell and convince themselves that they think they know inconsistency and contradiction(s) amid the social traumas and political quasi legal dramas. They will be the judge.

Fourth, and finally, as the erstwhile man of the law also knows, there are judges who are like jurors. Just as whimsical and jaw-dropping, even mind-reeling, in some of the wisdom that they deliver. As is said in America, it depends on which side of the bed he or she rolled out into the day. The startling sometimes emerges. Now, I lay at the feet of AG Nandlall this little legal nugget, one made of brass, that should stir something in his mind, maybe his political character. America had an Attorney General and White House counsel who made the sky their limit, when they had to deliver on touchy issues. I give Guyana’s AG Nandlall America’s John Ashcroft (AG) and Alberto Gonzales (counsel), who found justifications in their intellect, consciences, and soul for the unthinkable. It was torture. Neither found any inconsistency nor contradiction with the Geneva Convention; and, as I believe, the hallowed US Constitution. Alberto Gonzales was later rewarded with elevation to Attorney General of America. I move on, and leave the AG to make whatever he wishes of these simple, yeoman positions of mine.

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