IT has taken three court orders and nearly a year of prodding by human rights activists. But the correctional authorities now say that Randall Dixon will, by today, be taken off death row and put back in the general population at the St Catherine Adult Correctional Centre.

But despite criticism by the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights (IJCHR) over the pace at which the authorities have moved since the Privy Council last October overturned Dixon’s conviction, the head of the correction service, Major Richard Reese, defended the behaviour of his agency.

“We are dealing with the matter,” Reese told the Observer on Tuesday. “But we want to do things in a timely manner. If we followed the way that people wanted it to be done, then he would be dead by tomorrow morning.”

Among the reasons Reese advanced for his position was the over-crowding of the prison, to need for a psychiatric evaluation to be done on Dixon and for the authorities to determine where best he would fit within the prison population. On Tuesday, faced with mounting pressure from human rights activists and a media probe, he said Dixon would be released within two days.

Dixon and another man, Mark Sangster, were originally convicted for the 1996 killing of a policeman during the armed robbery of a Western Union remittance office in Spanish Town.

But the Privy Council last October overturned the conviction and remitted the matter to the Jamaican Appeal Court to determine whether they should be freed or face a re-trial. Sangster had received life imprisonment for his role in the robbery/murder.

A cop, who was shot in the leg during the robbery, picked Dixon and Sangster out of an ID parade but several other eyewitnesses were unable to identify the two. The only other witness who testified in court did not point out the men.

Despite the Privy Council ruling Dixon remained on death row.

Nancy Anderson, legal officer of the IJCHR said that she had been told by court officials that the Privy Council order was sent to the prison authorities, who later claimed that they did not understand the long and complexly-worded document.

Dixon’s case, according to Anderson, next got judicial attention on July 22 when the IJCHR went to the Appeal Court seeking a determination on whether he would be freed or have to go through the re-trial.

Justices Downer, Panton and Cooke set the hearing for September 22, but on discovering that Dixon was still on death row gave a general order that he was no longer under the sentence of death.

Twenty-one days later, with Dixon still on death row, the IJCHR again went to the Appeal Court with an application for bail. Justice Walker rejected the application but gave a specific order, Anderson stressed, for Dixon to be removed from death row. It still did not happen.

According to Anderson, when the IJCHR attempted to deliver the court order at the St Catherine prison, the superintendent in-charge declined to accept it, insisting that he would only accept it from his head office.

“Every effort we made, we got a run-around,” Anderson told the Observer.

But Reese, who was named as head of the prison services at the end of May, said that Dixon would be moved.

“It will be done,” he said. “The prison is overcrowded and to move one inmate from one section to another has to be done step by step.”