(Trinidad Express) – The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has agreed to extradite a Trinidadian man wanted in this country for drug trafficking after being given the assurance by the State that the prisoner will not be confined to inhumane prison conditions. Rick Gomes, 46, of Maraval, was arrested along with Venezuelan Luis Blanco Gomez, on May 15, 1998 at Spanish Villas, Mount Hololo, St Ann’s after detectives attached to the Organised Crime, Narcotics and Firearms Bureau raided the apartment and found more than 25 kilogrammes of cocaine.
At their trial, Justice Herbert Volney ruled that based on a discrepancy in the weight of the drug measured by the police and analysts attached to the Forensic Science Centre, he held that the State had failed to make out its case against both men.
The State almost immediately appealed the judge’s decision but the day after the ruling both men had already left the country. The Appeal Court, in July 2000, ruled that Volney’s decision was wrong, and ordered arrests warrants for the two men to face a retrial on the charges.
Gomes was arrested in the United Kingdom in 2006 and challenged his extradition through that country’s legal system. Earlier this year, the Privy Council dismissed his challenge, which complained that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him by reason of the passage of time since his arrest in 1998.
He also cited the inhumane conditions of the prisons in Trinidad and Tobago as a reason to block his return to this country.
The Law Lords on April 29 ruled that an accused who deliberately flees a country, where he is to be tried, was not generally entitled to rely on the ground of passage of time due to the delay of the extraditing State.
A second man, British national Benjamin Goodyer, who had also challenged his extradition to this country on drug trafficking charges, on the same complaints and failed, was extradited to this country earlier this year but had been imprisoned at the Remand Section of the Golden Grove Prison, in Arouca.
