MURDER most foul was the description used by former president Anthony Carmona of the slaying of Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal a decade ago.
“It is a moment like this that leaves one with a staggering sense of loss and even frustration that justice has not been served in a timely fashion to inspire much-needed hope in a judicial and law enforcement system that continues to meander, seemingly aimlessly, more so because some wounds just don’t heal and one such wound is the naked injustice of Dana’s passing,” Carmona said.
He was speaking at a remembrance ceremony in Seetahal’s honour hosted by the Criminal Bar Association at the Hugh Wooding Law School’s (HWLC) lecture hall, St Augustine, on May 25.
Around 12.05 am on May 4, 2014, Seetahal was driving her Volkswagen SUV to her One Woodbrook Place apartment when two vehicles blocked the road near the Woodbrook Youth Facility on Hamilton Holder Street, Port of Spain. The occupants of the vehicles got out and shot her five times. In July 2015, 11 men were charged with her murder. A preliminary inquiry into her murder was completed in July 2020, with ten men being committed to stand trial and one turning State witness.
Carmona said Seetahal’s murder shook the foundation stone of the nation’s faith in what was good and honourable and laid bare, in splinters, the moral fibre of a society in abject crisis.
“Doing right to others, doing the right thing and upholding the rule of law, somehow we feel such decency affords a level of protection and insulation from the evil vagaries of life. In Dana’s case like so many of our young men and women, this insulation never happened.”
He said Seetahal’s defining attribute was that of a “consistent glow.”
“She derived immense pleasure from her job, fashioning a type of perfection in her work.
“She possessed a unique sense of humour which defused difficult situations and facilitated affirmative interactions.”
Carmona said as an independent senator, she spoke courageously and firmly but with utmost civility.
“She never descended into the pit, never denigrating or engaging in personal acrimony.
“She had command of that diminishing skill and art of debating rather than reading her contributions in the Parliament.”
Carmona also provided anecdotes from former prosecutors now serving in the region of Seetahal’s influence on their careers.
“Therefore the morbid anniversary of Dana’s brutal death must do something, it must wake up the dead in us to make us alive, that the crime stats and rate are not only unprecedented but hopelessly aberrant, supported by consistent bold face, administrative and governmental incompetence and a slew of ideas where mediocrity of performance has become the benchmark standard of success in this Trinidad and Tobago.”
The former president acknowledged TT had become “an egregious society with no respect for the sanctity of human life made more appalling by the subsisting pervasive and accepted institutional fluff and governance models and philosophies that simply do not cater to the simple
