Corrupt cops cost taxpayers $4m more
State to compensate man after police fabricated evidence against him
THE FABRICATION of evidence by policemen who arrested and charged 24-year-old Akeem Armstrong of a Kingston address with illegal possession of firearm has resulted in the Supreme Court ordering the Government to pay him more than $4 million with interest. The police had testified that in 2008, they held Armstrong and another man with guns, but it later turned out at the trial that it was not so. Defence lawyers requested the station diary, in which it was recorded that the guns were found in a tenement yard and the accused men were not carrying the weapons as the police had
testified.
Armstrong and the other accused, Marlon Dwyer, were freed on a no-case submission in the Gun Court in June 2011.
“The Government has to find a way to arrive at a balance between the powers given to the police and the bridling of such powers to ensure that the police do not arbitrarily go overboard in abusing citizens,” says attorney-at-law Linton Gordon, who represented Armstrong at his trial and in the civil suit.
Following Armstrong’s acquittal, a suit was filed in the Supreme Court against the attorney general and the policemen involved in the case.
The attorney general accepted liability and the matter was set for assessment of damages.
DAMAGES AWARDED
Justice Chester Stamp, after hearing submissions from attorneys-at-law Tamiko Smith and Abiko Gordon, who represented Armstrong at the assessment of damages, made an award of $4 million.
The award included an amount for false imprisonment and aggravated damages and $2.4 million for special damages.
Armstrong, who was a 17-year-old student at the time of his arrest, spent several days in custody before he was granted bail.
He said in court documents that the charges against him and the case pending for such a long time affected his studies. Armstrong said the charges could have resulted in him being imprisoned for life and caused him mental strain and disruption in his studies.
Smith disclosed last week that although the assessment was done in July last year, the Government has not yet compensated Armstrong.
After the men were acquitted in 2011, attorney-at-law Alando Terrelonge, who represented Dwyer, said: “It makes us wonder how many young men have suffered the same fate at the hands of wicked and vile police officers who operate not to serve and protect but to secure a conviction against poor youth at any and all cost in their quest for selfaggrandisement.”
CALL FOR CLEANER FORCE
Terrelonge, now a member of parliament, had called on the Police High Command to rid the force of members who used corrupt practices to rob fellow citizens of their liberty.
Last week, he told The Sunday Gleaner that Dwyer had also filed a civil suit seeking compensation.
“In the interest of justice, I am hoping that there will be an amicable resolution,” said Terrelonge.
There have been a number of cases in which the police have been found to fabricate evidence in recent years.
In September 2014, 26-year-old David Clarke of Riverton City, Kingston, was freed in the Gun Court following a revelation that the police had manufactured evidence against him.
He was locked up for five weeks without bail after the police claimed that they searched him on September 5, 2011 and found a magazine with 14 rounds of ammunition.
At the trial, a member of the Jamaica Defence Force testified that the police did not find the ammunition on Clarke.
Police Constable Carey Lyn Shue was, in 2008, sentenced to six months’ imprisonment after he admitted to writing a false statement in a murder case.
He confessed that he wrote a false statement because witnesses were not willing to come forward. He admitted in court that he was speaking the truth because he had since become a Christian.
During a murder trial in the Home Circuit in 2003, Detective Sergeant Michael Sirjue fled the island after it was disclosed that he manufactured evidence against the accused men. The director of public prosecutions ruled then that he should be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice and uttering a forged document.