BRYAN Sykes, one of the DPP’s top men, Wednesday began to respond to the arguments with which former Resident Magistrate Norma Von Cork’s lawyers hope to overturn her conviction for conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the Bernal/Moore drug-smuggling case.

Sykes, who has been acting in the clearly vacant post of senior deputy director for over a year, told the three-member panel of judges hearing the appeal that the key question in the case was whether Von Cork’s actions had a tendency to pervert the course of justice.

Von Cork was convicted along with four men in April of 2000 by Resident Magistrate Almarie Haynes, who found the group guilty of a plot to cast doubt on the drug-smuggling convictions of businessman Christopher Moore and his then friend, Brian Bernal.

Bernal and his younger brother, Christopher, were accused, along with Moore, of attempting to smuggle 96 tins of ganja disguised as pineapple juice out of the island in 1994.

Shortly after the arrests, the prosecution dropped the case against Christopher Bernal. In the subsequent trial, Brian Bernal and Moore were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. The following four years saw them appealing to the local appellate court, which dismissed the appeal. They took the case to the United Kingdom Privy Council, which also dismissed the appeal, but sent the case back to the local appellate court with instructions that they admit and consider fresh evidence adduced by Brian Moore’s older brother, Dwight.

On hearing Dwight Moore’s evidence, which consisted of a story in which Christopher Moore had confessed to knowing that the tins were stuffed with ganja and duping Brian Bernal into believing otherwise, the local appellate court concluded that he was lying and proceeded to confirm the sentences of both men.

It was around the time of the hearing of Dwight Moore’s evidence in 1997 that Radcliffe Orr, one of the men with whom Von Cork was convicted, turned up in her court in the parish of Manchester on an unrelated charge of possession of one pound of ganja.

Orr took that opportunity to claim responsibility for packing with ganja the tins which had been found years earlier in Bernal’s luggage.

At the end of the investigation that his guilty plea triggered, Orr was arrested for attempting to pervert the course of justice along with Von Cork; her orderly, Ron McLean; Constable Morris Thompson and one Clive Ellis, who jumped bail before the trial started and Christopher Moore.

Their convictions, which were secured in part by the testimony of McLean, who cut a deal with the DPP, were accompanied by one-year prison sentences which their lawyers are trying to convince the local appellate court judges Ian Forte QC, Ransford Langrin and Seymour Panton to overturn.

Their efforts, which were led by attorney RNA Henriques QC, ended Wednesday with attorney Patrick Bailey insisting that RM Haynes hadn’t handled the evidence, which included an alleged part payment of $159,000 to Orr for his services, properly.

However, in his opening argument, Sykes pointed out there was nothing wrong with the way in which the RM handled the matter, nor the indictment which, according to Henriques’ earlier arguments, described an offence which was not known to law.