THE POWER OF MAURICE GLINTON
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generic viagra times;”>Last week we reported on this site that Maurice Glinton Q C was detained by the police on the authority of a bench warrant issued on Friday 9th October. The press reported that Mr. Glinton was summoned to court to show cause why he should not be held in contempt for allegedly walking out on the Court of Appeal after the Court ruled against him in a case in which he challenged the right of Abdulai Conteh, one of the Judges to sit on the court. Judges are to retire at age 70 on the Court of Appeal and cannot continue except to finish cases that they previously started. Mr. Glinton alleged that Mr. Conteh was in violation of the law.
The summons by the Court for contempt was answerable at 10 a.m. on Friday 9th October and Mr. Glinton it is alleged was late, by his lawyer’s account by ten minutes. He was said to have actually been in the Court after its start and the Court was still sitting but according to his lawyers he was not acknowledged and while Mr. Glinton was trying to sort out the confusion, he was arrested by the police.
It is alleged that the court did not then discharge the warrant even though the Judges were still in the precincts of the court but the police kept Mr. Glinton in a police lock up over the weekend. This is probably going to result in considerable litigation and unnecessary costs for the government. The litigation on that has allegedly been started.
His lawyers led by Wayne Munroe, with Alfred Sears Q C, Paul Moss and Raynard Rigby moved the court on Saturday 10 th October by way of a habeas corpus application before Justice Caroleta Bethel. She refused to order his release
Mr. Glinton then ended up being punished in advanced by being detained in a police lock up for four days without being seen by a Judge.
There is something egregiously wrong with all of that. There is a great irony in all of this. This is a country The Bahamas where Ministers of the Government, the Commissioner of Police all complain that murderers and repeat murderers are let out on bail by judges in this country, yet Maurice Glinton a Q C, known to the Court, no risk of flight, no danger to the society, could not be afforded the common courtesy by any judge in this country or by the police administratively for that matter to be released on his own recognizance until the the court sat again.
Andrew Allen, an attorney, writing in The Tribune on 14 October said:
“The Bahamian judiciary has indeed degenerated into a farce, a tragicomic institution whose quixotic dress and retention of antique language and ceremony have come to vividly reflect its alienation from the realities of the society in which it functions.
“To a slightly lesser extent, the other two institutional arms of government, Parliament and the Cabinet, are also alienated, and though they are (by the nature of their appointment to office) more exposed to the effects of public opinion, they are not as insulated from reality as the judges they appoint. This explains the tensions that arise between the two equally hopeless fraternities when a politician is caught having to explain the inexplicable and, in his anxiety, blurts out, among much else, the truth: that our courts have become a failed arm of the state in the crime fight.
“Judges, for their part, prefer to adopt the mantra of Groucho Marx (“who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”) when trying to shame the public into not seeing the glaring link between their reckless grants of bail and people getting killed.”
Mr. Allen was not talking about this particular problem but his words apply to this situation and we quote them with approval. (You can click here for the link to the full article:
http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/oct/14/your-say-change-needed-bahamian-judiciary/?opinion
Mr. Glinton must be a powerful fellow indeed to cause this tragicomic set of circumstances that occurred last weekend.
The Courts will in time answer the question was the man qualified to sit on the bench.
Mr. Glinton has been a crusader for every cause that challenges the establishment to its core. This is a key function in a democracy and does it no harm. People in these positions who make these judicial decisions should not take themselves so seriously that they forget that at the core of their existence is justice. In the modern dispensation the contempt jurisdiction for this sort of thing is outmoded and long ago the government and the legislature should have intervened to put an end to the ability of judges to dispense this kind of summary justice.
We end with a story. One day Henry Bostwick Q C was presiding as President of the Senate. The late Sir Randal Fawkes walked into the Senate and in the middle of the session demanded an audience with the Senators that he should get his pension and they should pass the law without delay. He stood up at the Bar and spoke his piece. Henry Bostwick prevented the sergeant at arms from doing anything. He let Sir Randal say his piece. Smart move. In certain circumstances that is the kind of judgment you exercise. The Judges in this case should have done the same thing. Just let it go.
Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 16th October 2015 up to midnight: 273,193;
Number of hits for the month of October up to Saturday 16th October 2015 up to midnight: 544,229;
Number of hits for the year 2015 up to Saturday 16th October 2015 up to midnight: 17,700,052.
4 Comments
Aside from the fact the Mr Maurice O. Glinton is my friend and one of the finest minds and human beings known to me, I know of no other lawyer in The Bahamas who has defended The Bahamas constitution – as he was when he become the victim of this venality – to an extent that special recognition was made of this by the Privy Council itself; admitting after a 10 year lonely slog that Glinton’s arguments presented in the death penalty cases were not only the product of legal genius but were morally right. That a judge of The Bahamas Court of Appeal – which is supposed to be the more jurisprudential of a nation’s courts – could so abuse senior council is not merely a disgrace, but it shows how these bogus titles – like QC which Mr. Glinton rejected for over 20 years- cannot purity the instinctive emity or hellish distaste with which Bahamian too often treat each other. One may wonder why this treatment of a “son of the soil” for a foreign judge – not even a member of the bar – whose erroneous presence on the court not only contravenes the constitution of The Bahamas, but if he is wrongly pensioned it will lead to a lifetime financial burden on the Bahamian taxpayer. Given the facts, it can hardly be doubted that Mr Glinton’s disgraceful and unpatriotic treatment was deliberate. But the more egregious note is that the judges seems to willfully misunderstand basic administrative law; even as the subtle and clearly legally sophisticated representative of the Attorney General’s office tried to caution them against their excesses. At least two judges of that court have written brilliant judgements in complex financial services cases, as such it begs wonder what may have blinded them not merely to the law but basic courtesy in this matter: tongues are wagging as to whether another country has so impressed upon them the need for certain outcomes in these extradition cases as an explanation of their feverish incoherence. I make no such accusation, but I do feel that by it’s disgraceful behaviour towards Mr Glntion, yet another national institution has made manifest the itinerant disease of arbitrary mediocrity and personalisation infecting increasing sections of our national life.
The treatment of Glinton, in my opinion was totally unnecessary, what point was proven?
Knowing Glinton the way I do, I can assure you. This isn’t over, like Harvey Tynes. At the end of the day the Government will have to shell out millions that they don’t have!!!
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