WESTERN BUREAU — Montego Bay Resident Magistrate Evan Brown berated the city’s deputy mayor, Gerard Mitchell, when he reappeared in court yesterday.

“High office is not about grandeur and glory but one of leadership… Your conduct throughout this sordid affair has left so much to be desired and very little to be admired,” the RM told Mitchell who had appeared before the court with his firearm inside his waist Tuesday.

Meanwhile, he fined the deputy mayor $5,000 or 10 days behind bars for the offence of obstructing traffic, but dismissed the other charges.

The RM said he was not satisfied that the prosecution had been able to sustain the charge of failing to produce a driver’s licence.

And he said the charge of driving away from the scene had no basis in law.

“(The charge of) driving away while the officer wrote the ticket appears to be running ahead of the legislators,” the RM said.

Mitchell is, however, not prepared to accept the judge’s ruling as evidenced by his attorney’s verbal notice of appeal after the judge had handed down his decision.

Mitchell, the People’s National Party (PNP) councillor for the Salt Spring Division, was before the court to answer to traffic offence charges.

The court was told that on January 4, the councillor drove on to the Mount Salem main road in the city, causing a back-up of traffic, which led Detective Corporal Davis, who was regulating traffic at the time, to ask him to reverse.

He did and the detective approached later asking him to produce his car documents and driver’s licence.

Mitchell handed over the car documents but not the licence and as the detective wrote up a ticket for his obstruction of traffic, he drove away.

The detective later wrote two additional tickets for him, for failing to produce his driver’s licence and for driving away.

On January 15, the detective and a constable went to the parish council offices on Union Street to give Mitchell the tickets. However, it was alleged that when they got there Mitchell refused to accept them and called the detective a “stupid ass …”

The tickets were thrown at his feet by the policemen.

“There must have been a better way to handle the situation than to call him a stupid ass,” the RM told Mitchell yesterday. “Your conduct, as I said, Sir, has left nothing to be admired.”

The RM added that someone in Mitchell’s position also had a responsibility to conduct himself with humility and that someone in his position really shouldn’t be before the court for what ought to have been a very simple matter.

Mitchell attempted to address the court then, despite the presence of his attorney, Victor Robinson.

He was not given an opportunity to do so and Robinson, in an apparent attempt to justify his client’s verbal treatment of the policeman, told the RM there were times when he, “a big man”, had been addressed as “boy” by police officers and asked that this be noted.

RM Brown would have none of it, however, saying such a statement had no relevance in this case.

“There’s no such evidence in this case,” he said.