OTHER arms of the protective services, apart from the police, are being encouraged to modify and adapt their operational procedures as it relates to suspects' oral admissions.

The advice came from Appeal Court judges Mark Mohammed, Gillian Lucky and Malcolm Holdip on Tuesday, as they expanded the guidelines enunciated in the precedent-setting decision of Frankie Boodram in 2003 to include other security agencies, not only the police.

In the Boodram judgment, the Appeal Court directed police officers to make contemporaneous notes of oral admissions and utterances by suspects which should be read over to the speaker and signed by them, since they could be used as evidence. It also advises police officers to enter these admissions in their pocket or station diaries.

These guidelines have now been expanded to other security agencies, including the Coast Guard, and were made in an appeal by convicted drug trafficker Peter Coltes, 63, who was sentenced to almost 15 years of hard labour at his second trial in 2019.

The appeal was dismissed and his sentence was affirmed.

Coltes was held by the Coast Guard on July 29, 2006, off the Chaguaramas coast, after it received a call about a vessel travelling from Venezuela to Trinidad.

After leaving headquarters at Staubles Bay in an interceptor, coastguardsmen spotted the 30-foot pirogue and stopped abruptly alongside it. There were two men in the pirogue – Coltes, who was piloting the pirogue, and another man.

The coastguardsmen signalled to them to stop, but the pirogue sped off and while pursuing the boat, the officers saw one of the men throwing two black garbage bags into the water.

Eventually, the coastguardsmen were able to stop the pirogue between Centipede Island and the mainland. They also collected the two garbage bags and told Coltes and the other man to board the Coast Guard boat, the Midnight Express.

Coltes admitted to the Coast Guard there was marijuana in the bags and the men were taken to Staubles Bay, while the pirogue was towed there. The coastguardsmen inspected the bags and called the police.

When questioned, Coltes told the police: “Boss that is mine. When I see the Coast Guard, I get frightened and throw it overboard.”

The marijuana found in the bags weighed 37.6 kilogrammes.

Coltes’s defence was that the case against him was fabricated.

At his appeal, argued by attorney John Heath, he advanced two grounds of appeal. His first related to the lack of contemporaneous notes made by the Coast Guard officers, and since the Boodram guidelines were only directed to the police, the judge wrongly placed the evidence of the coastguardsmen and the police on the oral utterance on the same footing.

It was for this reason, although finding no merit to the ground of appeal, that the court expanded the Boodram guidelines to include the Coast Guard, pointing out “there will be instances in which confessions and/or admissions are made to persons who are not police officers.”

The judges also clarified the element of actual and constructive poss