INDECOM must not prosecute its own investigations

IHAVE noted with some concern, the many cartoons and letters to the editor supporting and urging the Legislature to amend the INDECOM Act to give that body the power to arrest, charge, and prosecute police personnel. This has arisen since the Court of Appeal’s decision indicating that under the legislation, INDECOM employees do not have these powers.

Those of us familiar with the system of justice will readily understand why it is that those powers must be exercised by an independent body with no particular interest and operating without bias.

The overriding requirement of a trial is to ensure that the citizen is fairly tried. In that regard, a number of rules have been developed and the rationale has been well understood and accepted over centuries. Not only are they fair, but tried and proven to enable fairness.

The decision to prosecute and the prosecution of matters have always been vested in the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) under the Constitution.

Among the rules, it cannot be overemphasised, is the origin and role of a prosecutor. Prosecutors are charged with being ‘ministers of justice’; they have no interest to serve as they neither investigated the matter, nor are they an arm of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF). They are required to jettison any notion of winning or losing. Their function is to lay before the court what they consider to be credible evidence relevant to the crime. That function is “a matter of public duty than which in civil life there can be none charged with greater personal responsibility. It is to be efficiently performed with an ingrained sense of dignity, the seriousness and the justness of judicial proceedings”. R. v Barry Randall.

That is why police officers, even if they are charged, can have those charges discontinued by the DPP who has the constitutional power to do so.

That is the very reason why INDECOM ought not to be allowed to arrest and prosecute its own cases; if not only because it would have an interest in ensuring that the matter it has investigated succeeds, but most importantly, any bias and interest to serve may blind them to the requirement that justice must prevail at all times.

INDECOM must not arrest, charge, and prosecute its own investigations but must be subject to the constitutional buffer of the Office of the DPP if we are to ensure that justice in Jamaica is not an illusion. Let us all be guided by the oft-used phrase that “there can be no peace without justice.”

VALERIE NEITA-ROBERTSON Q.C. Attorney-at-law