DR Royston Clifford, the Government’s chief forensic pathologist claimed yesterday that he was hounded out of office by the human rights group, Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), which wanted to have a sympathiser rather than a professional in the job.

“I do not conform to the JFJ policies, you know,” Clifford told the Sunday Observer. “Each time they try to manipulate me, I give them a hard time and they give me a hard time.”

Clifford rejected that he could have been sacked by the national security ministry, when, in fact, he had no contract in place — the last one expired on February 20 — and he had gone of leave. He hinted at legal action against the Government for the “embarrassing” public statements about his status.

“My reputation has suffered severely and I have put the matter in the hands of my attorneys,” Clifford told the Sunday Observer.

Clifford, 67, was chief pathologist for 17 years. But last Thursday, Gilbert Scott, the permanent secretary in the security ministry, announced that he had told the Public Services Commission (PSC), which formally hires and fires government workers, that the ministry did not wish to renew Clifford’s contract.

Officially, Scott’s action was because Clifford had been away from the job for more than a week without permission or having applied for leave. The lock to his office has been changed.

But just below the surface has been the long contentious matter of Clifford’s resistance to the Government’s policy directive that the next of kin be allowed to appoint observers to witness the autopsies of the victims of police killings.

The Government is in a position to now act firm with Clifford for it has, since the late 1990s, had three other trained forensic pathologists who were recruited from India.

Before that, Clifford worked mostly alone. At one stage, for a decade, he had no assistants. Along the way he has developed a formidable set of statistics: over 15,000 autopsies including 5,000 murder cases.

“I am unable to access my correspondence, my official and personal documents,” Clifford complained. “I have a number of documents in there relating to court cases in which I have to appear, but they have changed the lock on me. So I am a prisoner of the ministry.

“Is this the way they treat me after giving Government 17 years of hard work? What have I done why all of a sudden they are doing this to me? This is an embarrassment, not only to me, but to my family and the nation.”

It all started in 1999 when JFJ first attempted to get a doctor to observe the autopsy of Michael Gayle, the mentally-ill young man who died after being beaten at a roadblock by police and soldiers.

In that, and other cases, including at the autopsies of the Braeton 7, the young men killed in a Portmore house during what the police said was a gunfight, Clifford, having acquiesced to the presence of observers, fought against them taking notes.

The man who Clifford has placed squarely in his sigh is Dr Ademola Odunfa, a one-time assistant, who the JFJ has used as an independent observer in a number of autopsies of victims of police killings. Clifford painted Odunfa as a clinical pathologist, who was incompetent as a forensic pathologist and had failed to absorb Clifford’s attempt to train him.

Apparently, the most recent issue with JFJ and Odunfa was the case of Basil Brown, a Rastafarian street vendor who was shot dead by the police near the Andrews Hospital in Kingston earlier this month. The quarrel was over whether an observer should be allowed and whether he should be allowed to take notes.

“I have objected to observers in the past because I have no confidence in decisions they have made,” said Clifford. “My experience is that transparency is usually followed by dishonesty.”

In the instance of the Brown case, Clifford claimed, the independent observer told the family that he observed six gunshot wounds to the body. But the doctor who performed the post-mortem and the police investigator reported that Brown was shot three times. There were three entry wounds and three exit wounds.

Yet, on the basis of wrong information, Clifford claimed, the doctor and the police were accused of a cover-up and the forensic pathologist had to leave the hospital under police protection.

“So you see, this is the doctor that JFJ is pushing to get into the ministry to work,” Clifford said.

In an earlier letter to the Observer complaining about public statements by the security ministry, Clifford concluded: “One can only assume that the actions of those involved, the degree of intent is to embarrass me to leave. This is what the Jamaicans for Justice group has been trying for in the past so they can recommend one of their own for the job. I wish them all the best of luck.”

Neither Odunfa nor JFJ officials were immediately available to comment on Clifford’s accusation, but the human rights group had on Friday welcomed the Government’s decision to sack Clifford and suggested that it should have happened long ago.

Susan Goffe, the JFJ chairman, said that the fact that nothing was done before now was “an indictment on the system of accountability in the security ministry”.

She called for a complete overhaul of its forensic medicine department.

But Clifford does not believe that JFJ or the other human rights groups that have criticised him in the past have the integrity to properly comment on his work.

He pointed, as an example, to their embrace and promotion of Dr Peter Leth, who Amnesty International brought from Denmark to observe the Breaton autopsies.

Leth was not allowed to make notes during the actual post-mortem but produced a damning report that essentially accused the police of murdering the group.

Said Clifford: “Most of what he wrote in his report, in my opinion and the (opinion of the) doctor doing the autopsy, was not accurate. To make matters worse, that man was not a forensic pathologist.

“He testified in court that he did three seminars to be an expert. I did four years of post-graduate training to be an expert.

“JFJ brought an impostor who had no experience in pathology to observe… yet they talk about transparency.”