THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

ON MONDAY, the Director of Public Prosecutions withdrew the 2005 Piarco Airport construction corruption cases against former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday and his wife Oma, former Minister of Something or the Other Carlos John and Still Very Rich Man Ishwar Galbaransingh and, in the slave ship-level overcrowded Remand Yard of the Port of Spain Prison, young men rejoiced as one, although they were crammed 11 to a cell built for one.

Because, if it took only 18 years for a prosecution unlikely to succeed against some of the most powerful individuals in the country to be withdrawn, there emerged this week a slim chance that those Remand Yarders might have their own potentially dodgy prosecutions nullified and, ergo, might get out of jail before they were entitled to claim the state pension.

There's a page one story waiting to be written about the number of young men accused of crimes who have now spent longer behind bars waiting for their cases to begin than they would have if they'd served the maximum sentence, had they been convicted of the crime with which they'd been charged.

(I would write that story myself, because I think we would all be shocked by it, but I still have PTSD from the day, 20 years or so ago, that I rang the commissioner of prisons, then Michael Hercules, who was at Hugh Wooding Law School with me in 1983, to find out how many prisoners there were on Death Row, a stat I needed for a single sentence in one of these columns. Hercules was not in the office and the officer I spoke with, on hearing I was writing for a newspaper, flatly refused to tell me, claiming the figure was a matter of national security. 'How am I supposed to find out, then?' I asked him. 'Come down and count them if you want!' he snarled; and hung up.)

Now DPP Roger Gaspard has always struck me as one of the professionals upon whom TT relies to do a thankless job well, probably at a great personal cost, and I don't doubt he made the right decision in context; but it could hardly come at a worse time for anyone hoping our judicial system might yet be our saviour.

Because I don't think we can look to our leadership in any sphere, other than the arts, to help us extricate ourselves from the mess in which we (and our colonial legacy) have landed ourselves. The other two branches are not the strong legs of the tripod of government. Our politicians will cheerfully lead us into temptation and deliver us into evil and our House of Representatives fails us by definition, since it does not represent fully half of us at any given time in any given Parliament.

So all hope rests with the last branch of government.

But the withdrawal of charges by the DPP this week are likely to be seen by many as yet another nail in the coffin of legal accountability.

And yet it is precisely decisions like this, whose main hallmark is independence, that may matter most.

If you found yourself sneering on Monday when you heard that the "Big Four" of Piarco were to walk away scot-fre