(Trinidad Express) A High Court judge who as a prosecutor represented the State in the historic 2006 case against former Chief Justice Sat Sharma has now been accused of misconduct.
Justice Carla Brown-Antoine has been reported to the Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) for alleged misconduct in a murder trial. The charge was levelled by her former colleague, acting Senior State Counsel Brent Winter, in a letter to the JLSC dated December 8, 2014.
In his letter of complaint, Winter claimed that on November 6, 2014, Brown-Antoine “participated in an off-the-record ex parte (one side only) meeting with prosecutors” minutes after empanelling a jury in a murder trial. Winter wrote that “the issues raised by the learned judge exemplified a bias towards the prosecution and were calculated to influence the prosecution in the pending case.” His five-page complaint further accused Brown-Antoine of having “secret communications” with prosecutors in three previous criminal trials “with a view towards influencing the outcome of those cases in favour of the prosecution.”
Contacted by the Sunday Express yesterday, Brown-Antoine reserved comment except to say, “People should not judge until they have all the facts.” Brown-Antoine sits in the Second Criminal Court at the Hall of Justice, Port of Spain. She was attached to the Director of Public Prosecutions’s (DPP’s) office for almost 20 years during which she acted as DPP on several occasions. Her longest acting appointment was in 2006 during which she represented the State in a case against Sharma when he was charged with the criminal offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice. The charges against Sharma were discontinued after his accuser, then chief magistrate Sherman McNicolls, refused to testify against him. Brown-Antoine had then severely criticised McNicholls who had opted to testify against Sharma at an impeachment tribunal instead. Brown-Antoine, sources said then, had impressed the legal and judicial circles with her ability to maintain the integrity of the DPP’s office in that highly politicised fight between Sharma, then prime minister Patrick Manning and former attorney general John Jeremie.
Manning in 2009 stunned the legal community when he vetoed a JLSC recommendation to appoint Brown-Antoine as DPP. She was appointed a High Court judge in the same year. In his letter of complaint addressed to chairman of the JLSC, Chief Justice Ivor Archie, Winter explained that prosecutors and defence counsel normally communicate with judges through administrative staff and if there is to be an ex parte meeting with a judge, a court clerk should be present and a detailed record of the meeting should be kept. In this instance, he wrote, although both a Judicial Support Officer (JSO) and an orderly were present, no record of the meeting was kept. Winter’s letter also complained that the judge made “rather disparaging remarks about my professional conduct”. The trial continues in the High Court before a different judge. Brown-Antoine recused herself for reasons unrelated to the complaint made against her by Winter. Winter’s letter was copied to the DPP, Roger Gaspard, SC. Winter took the unusual step of also copying the complaint to president of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), Pamela Elder, SC, and president of the Law Association (LATT), Seenath Jairam, SC, although judges are not members of LATT and state prosecutors are not voting members. Elder was one of a team of lawyers who defended Sharma in 2006.
In a telephone interview with the Sunday Express on Friday, Winter admitted he was advised to write the letter against Brown-Antoine. “I did speak to persons more senior than myself in the law profession and following those discussions, I decided to take the course of action I did,” he said. The Sunday Express enquired of Winter why he copied his letter to Elder and Jairam given that their organisations do not have the authority to deal with his complaint since matters regarding judges fall under the jurisdiction of the JLSC.
“Having regard to the fact that the subject of my complaint was a High Court judge and the legal fraternity in Trinidad is a very small one, I wanted both the LATT and the Criminal Bar to be fully apprised of the content of my complaint and it was in that regard I copied it to both entities,” he said. Winter told the Sunday Express that sometime on December 20, Elder contacted him “and I was very satisfied with my conversation with her”. He said he is yet to speak with Jairam. Asked what the discussions with Elder entailed, Winter said, “I would view that as being confidential. I don’t wish to comment on our discussions.”
Winter’s letter of complaint also took aim at his boss, current DPP Roger Gaspard. Winter lists three items of correspondence dated November 7, 21 and December 2 which were sent to Gaspard requesting the he (Winter) be reassigned to another Court. Winter claimed that following his memos of November 7 and 21 to the DPP, the DPP convened a meeting and refused his request for reassignment. He said the DPP is yet to respond to his last memo of December 2. Winter concluded that “my complaints are being ‘swept under the rug’.” Contacted last Friday, Gaspard said the matter is engaging the attention of the JLSC and is out of his hands. Winter told the Sunday Express he is “most definitely standing by the contents of the statements made” and having spoken to the DPP, “no action was taken and I subsequently made my complaint to the JLSC. I really don’t wish to comment on whether I was satisfied or not (with the DPP’s response) but the facts are there. I did inform him of my information and again I was not favoured in any response and that’s when I wrote the JLSC.”
Winter’s letter is not the first to call into question the actions of a sitting judge. In November 2013, attorney Criston Williams took Chief Justice Ivor Archie to task, questioning delays in appeal judgments. Williams had issued a pre-action protocol letter to Archie and the Solicitor-General’s office threatening to file a constitutional motion against Archie and the judiciary claiming the delays breached his clients’ constitutional rights. Williams represented convicted killers Lester Pitman and Gerald Wilson who were awaiting judgments in their cases for three and four years respectively. In a second letter to the Supreme Court Registrar, Williams said he intended to send a complaint to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar asking her to exercise her discretion under Section 137 of the Constitution which deals with impeachment proceedings against a Chief Justice. The letters caused a stir in legal circles with Williams explaining to the Sunday Express that when he initially drafted the second letter dated December 5, 2013, it included all three appellate judges (Archie, Paula Mae Weeks and Alice Yorke Soo-Hon). But, he said, on the advice of a Queen’s Counsel the letter was eventually addressed only to Archie.
