THE Jamaican Government is exploring what legal action can be taken against an Amnesty International official who argued, in Monday’s Observer, that Reneto Adams – like other Jamaican lawmen before him – will be acquitted of murder.

The comments made by Piers Bannister, according to Justice Minister and Attorney-General A J Nicholson, amounted to contempt of court.

Said Nicholson: “This statement. purports to prophesy what the result of the trial will be and to assert, in effect, that this result will not only be a miscarriage of justice in itself but will be typical of the way in which certain categories of cases are dealt with by our judicial system.”

He added: “This official would not have dared to make such a comment in England in respect of a case pending in their courts.”

Bannister is the London-based researcher on Amnesty International’s North American/English-speaking Caribbean team. His original comments were made in an exchange of emails with Desmond Allen, whose extensive interview with Adams was carried in the Sunday Observer on June 5 and 12. Bannister had argued that the ground was being prepared for Adams’ return to front-line duties.

Adams, the former head of the now-disbanded Crime Management Unit, was given a desk job after he and other CMU members were charged with murder after a May 2003 shooting in Crawle, Clarendon, left two women and two men dead.

“I think that everyone knows that Mr Adams and his colleagues will be found not guilty in September just as (in the case of) the Braeton Seven,” Bannister told Allen via email.

On February 11 of this year, six police officers were freed of the March 2001 murder of seven young men at a home in Braeton. The cops were also members of the CMU.

Arguing that no police officer had been convicted of murder in Jamaica in the last six years, the Amnesty official said Jamaican police are “immune from effective prosecution and are allowed to carry out killings with impunity”.

Bannister’s comments, Nicholson said yesterday, were a ” kind of broadside attack upon the integrity of the judicial system” and also threatened Adams’ ability to get a fair trial.

Though there was “an absence of specific statutory enactment in Jamaica”, the justice minister said, there is a remedy for this swipe at the country’s judicial system at common law.

“I am therefore considering,” Nicholson said, “along with the legal officers of the government, what steps may be taken in order to protect the good name of our country, its reputation for strict adherence to the rule of law and to prevent this kind of mischievous and damaging allegation being made in the future.”