The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) recently dismissed appeal applications from three Barbadian men wanted in the United States as part of a drug trafficking ring that also ensnared two Guyanese.
In 2004, Sean Gaskin, Frederick Christopher Hawkesworth and John Wayne Scantlebury were indicted in the US along with Guyanese Raphael Douglas and Terrence Sugrim. The men were being sought for trafficking between Guyana, Barbados, St Lucia and the US and it was alleged that they committed the crimes between January 1999 and March 27, 2004.
While the Barbadian trio was fighting extradition, Douglas had pleaded guilty to his charges in the US and was sentenced to time served. He was then deported to Guyana. Sugrim fought his extradition from Guyana and was released on bail in the High Court.
Sugrim was wanted by United States authorities to face trial for allegedly conspiring to traffic in narcotics. He had been arrested and an extradition hearing was held, following which he had been committed into custody to await extradition to the US to face trial for allegedly conspiring to traffic in narcotics. But on April 17, 2008, Justice Jainarayan Singh Jr. released Sugrim on $1M bail in the High Court, following a habeas corpus application by his legal team. Stemming from the application filed by Sugrim’s legal team, Justice Singh found that many factual errors were made by the magistrate during the extradition hearing and they were serious enough transgressions to render her rulings in relation to the committal unlawful and unfair.
In the case of the three Barbadian men, they made individual applications to the CCJ for an extension of time within which to seek special leave to appeal to the court; special leave to appeal; and also leave to appeal to the court as a poor person. As a result of the identical circumstances surrounding each of the applications, the court heard them all together and concluded that they would all either succeed and or all be denied.
On January 28, 2011 the court heard the applications by audio conference and immediately after receiving the oral submissions of counsel, the CCJ judges made separate orders dismissing the applications. The written judgment of the court was made public last Thursday.
The CCJ, in its written judgment focused on Gaskin’s case, which the court said was identical to the circumstances in the other matters. Gaskin was arrested in May 2004, in connection with extradition proceedings initiated by the Government of the United States of America. Gaskin’s submissions at the close of case for the prosecution were overruled in the extradition proceedings and he later sought judicial review in the Barbados High Court.
Gaskin was dissatisfied with the High Court ruling and later appealed to the Court of Appeal. The appeal was dismissed. He was granted leave to appeal to the CCJ in July 2009 and the Court of Appeal imposed two conditions in granting the leave; the court ordered him to provide security for costs in the amount of $15,000 within sixty days from the date of the making of that court’s order and for him to provide to the proper officer (i.e. the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Barbados) within a period not exceeding ninety days, a list of documents to be included in the record of appeal.
The CCJ ruling pointed out that Gaskin did not comply with the Court of Appeal’s order. No security for costs was provided. Instead, the court said that Gaskin purported to file a notice of appeal on the 18th December, 2009. On the 30th December, 2009, the proper officer issued a certificate of non-compliance in relation to his intended appeal. The certificate was served in January, 2010.
The court said Gaskin took no further step until 16th June, 2010, when he filed an application to the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal in relation to what he considered to be his pending appeal. But the Court of Appeal dismissed this application for failure to comply with the rules, and in December 2010 he filed the applications before the CCJ.
In the December application, Gaskin said that he was impoverished and unable to provide security and secondly, that the matters raised by his appeal involved a question as to the interpretation of the Constitution.
The CCJ said it was wholly unimpressed by the submissions made by Gaskin’s counsel. Counsel for Gaskin claimed that he was somewhat confused by the requirements of the CCJ’s Appellate Jurisdiction Rules (“the AJR”) and that he was unsure of how he should have proceeded in light of his impoverishment and the Court of Appeal’s order for security for costs. “If an intended appellant is unable to provide security for costs, it is always open to that person to seek leave to appeal as a poor person. The Applicant should therefore have made an application to appeal as a poor person when his application for leave to appeal to the CCJ was made to the court below,” the CCJ ruled.
A person granted leave to appeal as a poor person is not required to provide security for costs or to pay any court fees, but the CCJ said it was difficult to imagine that Gaskin had catastrophically become impoverished after filing his application to the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal. The court also observed that without a certificate of compliance, no valid notice of appeal can be filed unless “of course a person has obtained special leave to appeal from the CCJ itself.” Gaskin did attempt to seek special leave to appeal from the court in his December 2010 application, but the court ruled that it was technically impossible for him to do so because he breached the rules. “This is a case where repeated and egregious breaches of the rules have served only to prolong the final disposition of a hearing before the Chief Magistrate that is still to be completed. There is no cogent explanation for the several breaches. Since the liberty of the subject was at stake, the Applicant himself should not have been as dilatory as he was,” the CCJ ruled.
The CCJ panel of judges who heard the case included Justices Rolston Nelson; Adrian Saunders; Jacob Wit; David Hayton and Winston Anderson.
