Glaring police failures

TO CONSIDER the case of grieving widow Maureen Dilchan Maharajh, who sued the state for its mishandling of a dangerous driving charge against the person responsible for her husband’s death 14 years ago, is to come face to face with shocking police failures.

In a watershed constitutional ruling, High Court judge Justice Kevin Ramcharan on July 1 awarded Ms Maharajh $500,000 in damages because of the impact of a senior police officer’s non-attendance on the driver’s prosecution. It is little consolation.

Collapsing trials due to police complainants not showing up are so common they have become run-of-the-mill. That should not be. The ordeal endured by Ms Maharajh and her two sons, Shiva and Girish, is a particularly graphic illustration of why.

On August 15, 2011, Girish’s tenth birthday, the family was driving along the Eastern Main Road in Manzanilla. A green Nissan crashed into them. Maureen’s husband, Rajkumar, died. She and her sons were badly injured. To date, stepping foot into a vehicle remains difficult.

Compounding this tragedy, however, was the way the police handled a traffic prosecution brought against the driver of the other car. That driver walked free when the officer in charge, a corporal, failed to attend court, forcing the presiding magistrate to throw out the case. That was only a small part of the problem.

Not only did the complainant miss almost a dozen hearings, but there was an attempt to get the widow to change her witness statement; she was lied to about the case; summonses were never served and court orders to do so were ignored; she was never told the case had collapsed; disciplinary proceedings against the absent corporal were limited to only his final day of non-attendance.

Justice Ramcharan rightly concluded rights under the Constitution to equal protection under the law and to procedural fairness were breached.

But the judge was wrong to distinguish, as it relates to the disciplinary complaint brought against the cop, between the duty of the state to ensure a fair procedure and a particular result. Both things are related. It is hard not to conclude that the overly narrow procedural scope of the tribunal was not a deliberate move designed to guarantee its result.

At the root of all the failings endured in this case, we believe, is contempt for people who cannot afford to sue.

Ms Maharajh was lucky Anand Ramlogan, SC, took up her matter. But with 1,843 cases thrown out due to non-attendance in the year 2019 alone, how many others out there might be suffering a similar plight? It is time for the state to dispense with in-person attendance for police complainants where their evidence is not essential, or else fully censure officers who breach their duties.