COLLEAGUE columnist Ken Chaplin’s excellent Tuesday column, “Dudus, US Govt, interception of information”, in explaining that Prime Minister Golding was acting on solid ground in refusing the extradition based on evidence gathered through a breach of Dudus’s constitutional right — his phone was tapped without the required judicial authorisation — wrote, “The law… requires that for intercepted communication to be admissible in any criminal proceedings, it must have been obtained, disclosed and used in accordance with the provisions of the Act. Golding said that this was not done.”

The article further states, “The Act shows that the proper procedure, which requires an authorised officer to apply ex parte (without the other side being present) to a judge in Chambers for a warrant to intercept information in the course of transmission by means of a public or private telecommunication network, was not followed.”

Most systems of checks and balances are never instituted nor do they evolve because man is, after all, an incorruptible unit of society. Rather, it tends in the opposite direction. Man is corruptible and hence our legal and justice systems, as those which ought to occupy the highest of a society’s ideals, must reflect the superior nature of the system to circumvent possible attempts by corrupt man to outwit it.

In between perception of an action, the nature of the community’s information flow, solid information and just plain gossip, Jamaica is little more than a small fishing village where often it is not so much that a good haul was not made than it is the size of the fish story. The Jamaican saying, “If supp’n nuh go so, it nearly go so” is as authentic Jamaican as it is dangerous in the strict legal sense.

On the ladder of justice, that is, from the time the police begin to investigate a wrong to conviction or non-guilt in the highest court of the land, it is in vogue to commit the police to the worst accusations of corruption and direct criminal involvement, while in polite company the argument goes 180 degrees in favour of accepting that members of the judiciary are, unlike the rest of us, incorruptible. Well, leave the polite gathering for a while and hit the streets.

There it is the view of the little man and woman at street level that not one single level of Jamaican society is free from corruption. There may be individuals within each segment of the various branches making up a society who are clean to a fault, like, say, Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ken Baugh, but these persons tend not to represent the general behaviour of the output of the majority.

Now I have absolutely no evidence that members of the judiciary are corrupt. In the past I have had individuals telling me stories and providing me with “dangerous” anecdotes on certain high officials but very few, if any, are ever prepared to step forward and defend the allegations.

To me, one part of the problem that has cropped up with the understanding of the extradition treaty is, which parts of it are, prior to granting an extradition request, legally determinable in Jamaica and by what process? On the other side, which conditions of the treaty is it that empowers the Americans the right to render us speechless, that is, we must just sign and give up the person without further ado?

I have never been one of those who believe that the prime minister should never have involved himself in the delicate matter of the Dudus extradition request. Hell, whether the prime minister wanted to or not, he was involved.

He was involved as one of only a handful of politicians to declare our politics as much too close to criminality. The others are Dr Peter Phillips and Heather Robinson of the PNP. Once Golding adopted the mantle of “new and different” from his brief sojourn in the NDM, the party he founded, once he re-entered the ranks of the “same old, same old” JLP in 2002 and later claimed its leadership after steering himself into West Kingston and Tivoli Gardens, too many items were lined up not to have him involved.

Of the 26 extradition requests received since he became prime minister, he has had no occasion (except for Dudus) to go full frontal in supporting any other person’s “constitutional right”. So the very fact that he has come out in such strong support of Dudus, it ought to mean that he has taken legal advice from the highest levels before committing himself and is convinced that his legs are sturdy.

If, based on the treaty, it was determined that the American outfit which obtained evidence did so by the illegal wiretaps of phones, must we surmise that all the Americans say they have on Dudus is a file of telephone transcripts and the actual recordings? We would be naïve to believe that.

If I am a bad man and weeks before I steal a car I engage in telephone conversations with a fellow felon and those conversations are illegally obtained, what would happen if the police who recorded the conversations used them to nab me in the act of stealing the car? Would the fact that the telephone conversations were illegally obtained make the stealing of the car any less criminal?

We must bear in mind that the Americans are not under any romantic illusions about what sectors of our society are corrupt. From their own experiences, they have long recognised that at the end of the day a president like, say, the late Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton (with Monica Lewinsky), and most other people are all humans under the skin and especially under the covers. Far from being perfect, what America has that is the envy of the purists among us is the workable synergy which springs from the lateral and horizontal push-pull of checks and balances, with each level having probing tentacles on the other.

I am certain that the Americans must have known of the breach, so the question to be asked is why did not the investigating entity abide by the conditions of the Act and apply to a judge in Chambers for authorisation for a wiretap or a series of wiretaps? It is my belief that they acted outside of the specific provision because there is not a single layer of the local system which they trust. Not a policeman, not a judge.

All power seeks out other sources of power for power’s ultimate survival. The man running an organised car-stealing ring will seek out the “area leader” and maybe a friendly “supe”. The man doing drugs needs the supe and the “area leader”. The “area leader” needs the politician if only for the politician’s powerful connections right up to the top of the ladder, and the politician needs the preacher. The preacher needs the area leader if even to save his soul, but in the interim, a hefty donation to the church’s coffers will not hurt.

After a while it is difficult to tell the difference between the allegedly tainted one and the potentially tainted one who stands in judgement of him.

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