I COULDN’T believe what I was reading last week. Was president of the Bar Association quoted accurately?
I have to believe that he was, after all, there has not been a denial of the article that appeared in the DAILY NATION of May 16 under the headline Backing From The Bar.
Just for background, Andrew Pilgrim, president of the Bar, was reacting to attorney-at-law David Comissiong’s call for a foreign investigator to probe police killings.
Comissiong is representing Jamar Maynard’s family in the case in which the 27-year-old died after being shot on April 3. Details of how the shooting occurred are still sketchy since we’ve only seen the brief.
Comissiong has also publicly appealed for witnesses to step forward in order to have greater clarity on what happened. Nothing wrong there.
Actually, I sometimes admire how Comissiong manages from time to time to don that crusader’s cape faster than a speeding bullet to protect the public in the face of the most daunting of circumstances.
Wins or losses, I cannot account for but this controversial character certainly has a record for turning up in moments of distress for the underdog.
Comissiong, rather than supplementing official law enforcement agencies, always seems to go up against them. We are yet to find out his kryptonite.
However, the adventures of Super Activist Comissiong are not the source of my amazement in this non-illustrated series of the Nette Effect.
Pilgrim said police should not be allowed to investigate themselves. That, he said, would be like “lawyers judging lawyers and police judging police. It’s just not going to cut it”.
I may be wrong, and if I am, someone will correct me, but isn’t that what the lawyers do, investigate themselves through the Disciplinary Committee of the Bar Association? Shouldn’t this president be agitating in his own backyard first before looking elsewhere?
I think he is best placed for this type of action and Comissiong should join him in agitating for such. I am aware that Pilgrim’s concern comes from being a defence lawyer.
In the past, the airwaves have been flooded with calls and the newspapers inundated with letters from frustrated victims whose lawyers have run off with money from a particular transaction or refuse to hand over money from a fixed deposit where it is accumulating interest. That interest is not usually for the benefit of the client.
In other cases, the attorneys have their clients’ documents on lockdown preventing them from carrying on their vital business which may include the construction of a home.
Most of those affected will initially report the matter to the Bar and wait months or years without a resolution. I’ve sat through cases which ended up in the High Court after a long and not necessarily exhaustive investigation by the committee, only to have it sent back for further probing.
The hands of the court were tied because vital steps in the investigation had been omitted.The matters then had to be sent back to the committee for completion.
It cannot be at all heartening if an injured party is awaiting an insurance settlement, gets it but the money is lodged with his attorney who does not hand it over immediately or soon thereafter.
All the while the client’s medical bills are flowing in. His savings depleted because injury prevents him from working, the client is now at the mercy of others and a couple steps away from being a beggar.
How can that situation not move another human being to do what is conscionable?
It is only under extreme circumstances that a few of these lawyers are criminally charged and in even rarer circumstances disbarred.
I am for independence in both of these instances, not one and not the other.
* Antoinette Connell is Daily Nation Editor.
