LAST week Raymond Clough, one of the lawyers who represented the PNP’s Manley Bowen in his dual citizenship case against the JLP’s Shahine Robinson, informed Nationwide Radio listeners that it took US$64,000 to get the ‘goods’ on Robinson — that she held a US alien registration card, a certificate of naturalisation, and that she had sworn allegiance to the US Government on January 21, 2006.

This information was brought out as Clough tried to explain the $21,000,000 in costs awarded against Robinson which, at the time of writing this column (last Thursday), there was no indication as to how and when Ms Robinson will be dealing with this hefty bill.

Let us set aside the fact that a by-election has been held and, as expected, Ms Robinson won hands down. Let us also deliberately sidestep the disconnect between the PNP’s ‘noise-in-the-marketplace-without-a-single-item-sold’ approach of taking Robinson to court but not actually contesting the by-election.

If we can do that, we are only left with the conclusion that the PNP engaged Robinson through the court process to prove a point in the continuing and troubling dual citizenship issue, but we would not be far off in harbouring the thought that making Ms Robinson $21,000,000 poorer could have been one of the items on the PNP’s agenda.

I find it extremely distasteful that Robinson, after being forced to come clean, was put up once again as the JLP candidate in North East St Ann. It was highly unethical and grossly immoral, but that is the way of politics and politicians. If one can get away with it and it’s legal, and if that is what the voters want, give it to them, with a cherry on top.

Where will Ms Shahine Robinson get $21,000,000 to pay these costs? Assuming that J$6,000,000 was the bill for those in the US who unearthed the documentation, that would leave J$15,000,000 as the bulk of the lawyers’ fees.

Once the main administrative fees, including actual court costs, are deducted from that $15m, the lawyers should have a healthy payday coming, that is, when they collect. The question again is, where will Shahine Robinson find $21,000,000 to pay to these lawyers?

Conveniently, Prime Minister Golding has signalled that he could be using the parliamentary process to place a cap on the fees charged by lawyers. We have not determined just how much Robinson paid the lawyers who represented her. Is the prime minister concerned about the fees on both sides of the fence, or is he just politically agitated because one of his own came out on the losing end where it mattered most — in the pocket?

In Jamaica, most lawyers are demigods, and the good ones are divine creatures. We are a small pond where even mediocre lawyers can make the claim that they control murky spots in the pool. Highly trained professionals like lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, accountants, etc who are good at what they do should be paid well, but let us not fool ourselves that the majority of our people who find themselves embroiled in matters that require the court’s intervention can afford even half-dead legal representation.

In many instances the poor, who are taken up in such matters, are given the service proportional to the monies paid over to some of these lawyers who are often forced to take on multiple cases, many of which are being held at the same time in different courtrooms. Let the poor man complain and he will be ‘dressed down’ by the man or woman who is essentially his employee.

Many times when justice is dispensed the poor are left to wonder what actually did happen.

The prime minister must be very careful in this area. It is always thought by the man at street level that the only set of people who can afford expert legal representation are politicians, big businessmen, highly successful professionals and heads of organised criminality (dons, druggists, gunmen, extortionists). Because Jamaica is one of those countries where a man being tried for money laundering can use some of very money recently washed in detergent to pay his lawyers, there are times when it is extremely difficult to draw the distinction between accused person and lawyer.

In many inner-city settings, some of the dons and the residents in the communities have totally circumvented the authorised system, and over the years they have set up their own. Apart from the reasons of prohibitive cost, the actual process in the courts is, at times, akin to social terrorism.

Is the political corner too dark for the JLP?

In response to my column, ‘Will we see another nail-biting victory for the JLP in 2012?’ one reader wrote to say that the writing was already on the wall for the JLP.

Said he, “Sir Mark, I am no political pundit like you, but I travel around the island a lot and word on the street is that the people have already decided to give Bruce one term, JDIP or not. Talk to the civil servants (117,000), especially police and soldiers. They prefer to put back the stale PNP in power. Check it out.”

Another was more analytical and critical of both PNP and JLP. He did not rule out a JLP win.

“In your hypothetico-deductive reasoning for why the JLP could possibly win the next general election in 2012 (assuming one is not called before then), it can be argued that they do have a chance to win because the PNP, while opposing seemingly for the sake of opposing, has not offered any palatable alternatives to adequately and effectively address the issues that confront Jamaica.

“We still don’t know much if anything about the much-touted ‘Progressive Agenda’ and its leadership is still the same old bunch. The JLP could possibly win the next election for all the reasons/hypotheses that you floated. All this said, this Coke/MPP saga is the albatross around the neck of the JLP. It will not go away until folks get a full account of what happened, and most importantly, who financed this fiasco — a point you make in your column.

“We’ve more or less gotten something approaching a full accounting of what went down and all we need to know now is who was really and truly behind this. Even with all this, the fact that Bruce Golding had and has deluded himself and is trying to delude others into believing that the JLP could hire an American law/lobby firm to discuss treaty matters with the US Government is just that — a delusion. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips would not have taken on the JLP as a client to discuss treaty matters with the US Government, as we all know treaty matters are discussed/negotiated government-to-government, a point MPP is aware of and that our “genius” PM should be aware of.

“The JLP can win the next election not because they necessarily deserve to but because the standard for leadership in Jamaica has been set so low that this Government can surpass it (barely) while the Opposition is having a most difficult time, even running like Usain Bolt, surpassing anything.”

The salient point that the JLP could not have engaged Manatt has been made by me and others long before the enquiry was given birth. It therefore seems an impossibility for there to be anyone in the enquiry to give evidence in confirmation of something which could not have happened.

It will not be enough for the PM to say he sanctioned the initiative but only on a party basis when Manatt will be sure to say that the firm accepted the engagement on the only basis it could have accepted it — on a government-to-government basis.

The enquiry can be ended next week if only they would get down to the brass tacks of unearthing the donor of the fees paid to Manatt, Phelps and Phillips. We need to put this matter behind us.

Business enterprise in ganja a reality

I would not for one minute consider advocating the planting of ganja as an economic saviour to poorer Jamaicans, but the reality of its existence has preceded my considerations.

Late last year, one man in his late 30s literally pulled my arms to show me his ganja nursery. He was aware that I wrote for the Observer and yet he insisted that I take pictures of him beside his nursery. I was only interested in the seedlings.

As we walked through bushes and across rocks he said, “Mi expect fi get bout two pound weight outa whey mi plant.”

“So, yu nuh fraid a police?” I asked.

“No man. Police a my fren, an’ when mi weed come in, mi all gi dem a nice bag fi demself,” he replied.

His ‘real’ job was farming — vegetables mostly, but with some yams put in for the leaner months.

“So, how much yu can sell it for?” I asked. He responded by saying that he could not afford to wholesale the weed. “Mi a go deal wid it from planting to selling, right inna bag. Mi tink mi can mek bout $30,000.”

That small farmer’s reality has always attended the rural and not so rural way of life where survival is key. He has no other answers and there are few willing to provide him with tangible alternatives.

God Save the Queen?

OVER many years of witnessing interactions between the poor and the judiciary in Jamaica, I am convinced that many of the so-called ‘learned’ in these halls of ‘justice’ are — as bright and competent as they are — in constant class warfare with the many poor people who must appear before them.

Quite apart from the comedy of the opening lines of the ‘court crier’ — “God save the queen” — many of the people who appear before the courts seem to be more bullied than involved in a process of seeking justice. It is almost as if a bias exists the moment a man enters the courtroom and he looks too much like the labouring class who has not spent too much time in the classroom.

Since the passage of heavy rains associated with Tropical Storm Nicole, there occurred a shortage of ganja, Jamaica’s ‘other’ vegetable product. Prices went from $7,000 per pound to as high as $16,000 per pound. On the streets, the product is sold in plastic sachets of $50, $100, $200, and in much poorer communities the $20 sachet is still available.

At around the same time that the shortage of ganja was on, police began to swoop down on many poor communities to arbitrarily stick up youngsters on shop corners or close to the mouths of the many lanes dotting the inner-city areas. “Put up onnu hand in di air.”

A search is done. Two young men are found with plastic sachets in their pockets. Most young men cannot afford more that a $50 sachet. They are taken in and must later appear before the courts.

In a particular case that I know of, a young man was stupid enough to smoke a spliff at his gate. The police drove up and took him away.

In appearing before the courts the fines were $100 or 10 days for possession and $5,000 or 30 days for smoking. When his father got the paper to pay the fine, much to his horror, $4,000 was added as ‘court time’.

Last Thursday when I called the Half-Way-Tree Court a young lady told me that ‘court time’ was totally at the discretion of the judges. “Some will charge $500 and others will change $4,000,” the lady told me. I was shocked to learn that there was no real scale of fees and should really have asked her, when did this ‘court time’ come into being?

So, a man goes to court with about $7,000 in his pocket to pay the fine for his son smoking less than an eighth of an ounce of weed, and if he did not have over $9,000 his son would have had to spend time in jail.

It is, of course, the law that the smoking and possession of ganja is still illegal in Jamaica. The fact is, there are many uptown households to which the police will never have access to unearth a measly $50 sachet of ganja. Most policemen I know will turn a blind eye to a man under a tree in his yard or even a youngster surreptitiously puffing a spliff on a ‘corners’ near to his home.

In the last few months, however, it appears that some ‘hidden hand’ has been directing some policemen to go on a hunt to see if the national coffers can be filled.

It is scandalous that people facing the courts without legal representation must be charged this arbitrary ‘court time’ when one would assume that the fines levied by the judge are the final cost. Not good enough, that is, if we respect our people.

I can, of course, hear the do-gooder with a glass of whisky in his hand saying, ‘Lock them up if they break the law.’ Worse, many of these do-gooders oftentimes have their stash of something far stronger than ganja close by.

Let’s go to Jazz Festival

QUITE apart from my constant need to relocate to the North Coast at this time of the year to lose myself in the magic of the Jazz and Blues Festival, I was jolted to another reality when my 15-year-old stepdaughter said to me, “Mark, please, Maroon 5 will be coming. I have to be there.”

I had no earthly idea who or what was Maroon 5, one of the groups slated to appear on the line-up of artistes for the Jazz Festival being held January 27, 28 and 29 at the Trelawny Multi-purpose Stadium.

With Air Supply, Ron Isley, Maroon 5, Tavares, Diana King, Laura Izibor, SWV, Brenda Russell, Alison Hinds, Regina Belle and Committed slated to appear, I could only claim to know Air Supply, Ron Isley (from the Isley Brothers), Tavares and Regina Belle.

I have deliberately omitted Diana King because long before she became a star I hugged her, kissed her (at a New Year’s Eve Party in the late 1980s in an exclusive residential community close to Linstead) and told her in no uncertain terms that the sky was the limit for her and nothing would be able to stop her.

Fantastic woman!

Already the hotels are reporting full bookings, and Ed Bartlett has already begun the process of preening his feathers.

Hoping to see you there.

observemark@gmail.com