ALFRED Nettleford, 78, got the first instalment yesterday of a $9-million settlement with the Government — compensation for being mistakenly imprisoned at the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre in Kingston for 28 years.

In 1972, police accused Nettleford of throwing a rock through a bank’s window in Clarendon. A judge sent the tailor and former factory worker to Bellevue Mental Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Nettleford, however, become “lost in the system” and never returned to face charges, although a doctor had pronounced him fit to plea, said Nancy Anderson, a legal officer with the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights.

The frail but sprite Nettleford whispered several “thank yous” when handed a $1-million cheque at the rights group’s downtown Kingston office.

“He was brutalised while in prison and he suffered,” said the council’s chairman, Lloyd Barnett, during a news conference at the council’s headquarters.

Nettleford’s case is the most egregious of its kind that Barnett said he’s ever heard of in Jamaica or elsewhere.

“We didn’t know he was in prison,” said Hubert Graham, 38, a nephew from Spanish Town.

Graham said that one reason his mother was unable to locate her brother was because he had been imprisoned under the wrong name: Ivan Barrows.

When Nettleford failed to return home, he said, the family assumed he had disappeared under mysterious circumstances or returned to England, where he had lived years earlier.

Graham is Nettleford’s trustee along with his sister, Beverly Whyte, of Aenon Town, where Nettleford lives with her mother.

“He mostly sits and watches TV when he isn’t sleeping,” said Whyte, adding that he is in good health.

The plight of Nettleford and hundreds of other prisoners — mostly the mentally ill or those suspected of having psychological problems — came to light, thanks to Roger B Neill, a psychiatric social worker, who has worked in Jamaica’s prisons over the past several years.

Two years ago, Neill came across the dirty and shabbily dressed Nettleford. He was among hundreds of other prisoners who were mentally ill or thought to be suffering psychological problems, but ended up being warehoused in the nation’s prisons, Neill subsequently told local rights groups.

“He skin was very grey and dry and he didn’t lift his head when I talked to him,” recalled Anderson of her first visit with Nettleford.

On investigating Nettleford’s case, Anderson said she could find no files pertaining to his arrest for malicious destruction to property.

“They didn’t know when it happened, where it happened, and how it happened.”

It took a judge 15 minutes to dismiss the case against Nettleford.

Yvonne Barnett-Russell, a lawyer who works with the mentally ill in prison, estimated that 300 people remain imprisoned under circumstances similar to Nettleford’s.

“Basically, we try and get these people back before the court,” she said.

Barnett said the $9 million will be paid over a four-month period, and it was offered without any apologies.