(Trinidad Express) Ques-tions have been raised about how Magistrate Avason Quinlan could continue to sit on the Bench and dispense justice when she is before a disciplinary tribunal on four charges of judicial misconduct in a bail-fixing incident involving two men accused of drug trafficking.
Quinlan, who is married to Deputy Police Commissioner Stephen Williams, was charged with four counts of misconduct of a serious nature by the Judicial and Legal Service Commission (JLSC)—the body responsible for investigating complaints of misconduct against judicial officers—early last year, following a formal complaint that she allegedly violated a judicial canon that prohibited her from hearing a matter without the requisite case information before her and tampered with another magistrate’s remand in custody order.
She is accused of fixing bail with a surety in the sum of TT$10,000 for each of the two men, four hours after they were denied bail and remanded in custody by her colleague sitting in the Port of Spain drug court, Magistrate Brian Dabideen. A two-page statement of charges accused Quinlan of improper judicial conduct in a June 29, 2009, bail-fixing incident in the Port of Spain arms and ammunition court. Quinlan has denied all charges of wrongdoing but has been unable to explain how the men, Robert Spencer and Anthony Wilson, who were earlier that day remanded in custody and were being held in the downstairs holding cell in the Port of Spain Magistrates’ Court, came to be in her courtroom.
Dabideen, in a formal complaint filed in July 2009 with Senior Magistrate Lucina Cardenas Ragoonanan, said the men were not represented by counsel when they appeared before him, refused to be fingerprinted and admitted to having criminal records. He ordered that they be remanded into custody until the next day, pending a background check.
When the men appeared before him the following day, they had lawyered up and were out on bail. On checking the paperwork, Dabideen said he discovered that his previous order had been “crossed off” and bail granted with a surety in the sum of TT$10,000 for each of the two accused.
The tracing report showed that both men had previous drug convictions. One of them, Spencer, had two previous cocaine trafficking charges within the last 15 years and was not entitled to bail under Section Five of the amended 2008 Bail Act.
Dabideen revoked Quinlan’s bail order for both men, which he said were improperly granted. In his affidavit to the JLSC-appointed investigator, Justice Maureen Rajnauth-Lee, the magistrate claimed he was told that Quinlan called the two drug trafficking cases later that same day in courtroom 4B, the arms and ammunition court, “tampered with my endorsements and fixed bail in circumstances where there was no tracing report and prior prosecution’s objection to bail”.
He claimed staffers in the Office of the Clerk of the Peace told him that the prisoners’ case information was taken to courtroom 4B at the request of Magistrate Quinlan and that the transcript of the proceedings clearly showed she knew that the two drug cases were earlier that day adjudicated upon. According to the official court record, both men told Quinlan they had appeared before a magistrate earlier that day.
