THREE Appeal Court judges have upheld a ruling of retired Justice Judith Jones who, in 2012, ruled a group of prisoners suffered “unjustified and unreasonable” attacks at the hands of prison and police officers during a prison riot in 2006.
Justices of Appeal Nolan Bereaux, Peter Rajkumar, and Vasheist Kokaram dismissed the State’s appeal of Jones’s findings for prisoners Gabriel Joseph and Antonio Sobers while dismissing the appeal of a third prisoner, Clint Wilson.
Jones had been asked to determine whether the attacks on 57 prisoners, who were involved in a prison riot on November 11, 2006, were justified. The riot occurred at the Remand Yard prison facility at Golden Grove, Arouca. Some of the prisoners were beaten with batons and others were exposed to tear gas and shot with rubber bullets.
The prisoners represented three different categories of prisoners. Sobers’s lawsuit represented prisoners who sustained injuries and were treated at the hospital. Joseph’s represented a category of prisoners who sustained injuries that were treated at the prison infirmary while Wilson’s represented a category of prisoners who allegedly sustained injuries but had no medical records documenting them.
Wilson was not awarded any relief while assessment for damages for the group of prisoners represented in Sobers and Joseph’s lawsuits was to be referred to a judge or Master before the State and Wilson appealed.
The Court of Appeal had been asked by the State to set aside Jones’s findings in Sobers and Joseph’s claims.
However, in dismissing the State’s appeals, Rajkumar, who delivered the ruling, said the judge was not found to be “plainly wrong” in her assessment of the evidence.
“The evidence as a whole can reasonably be regarded as justifying that court’s conclusion.”
He said, “an appellate court is not entitled to review evidence as though it were itself a trial court making findings of fact for the first time unless the trial judge can be demonstrated to have been plainly wrong.”
However, he did question the agreement to divide the claims by the group into three categories. It had also been agreed that the cases in each category would be bound by the court’s findings in the action representing their category.
Rajkumar said there would have been logic in the agreement in Wilson’s case where the prisoners in that category did not have a medical record to corroborate their claims of injuries.
“The logic of doing so in respect of Mr Sobers and Mr Joseph is less clear,” he admitted, saying it was a matter of fact and evidence specific to each claimant.
“Despite the number of claimants involved, it is difficult to understand the basis of the categorisation, and the agreement that was presented to the trial judge, that the outcome of the cases of Mr Sobers and Mr Joseph would be binding upon others when it had not been demonstrated that they were similarly circumstanced in a necessary manner at the time they received those injuries.”
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