This is the 18th in a series of close encounters with death by Jamaicans, many of them in prominent positions of the society. PROMINENT attorney-at-law Kenneth Churchill Neita has, over a 45-year period, racked up a reputation for defending some of the most feared and brazen individuals in Jamaica’s history.

It was unthinkable that such a man, widely regarded as one of Jamaica’s finest lawyers ever, would stare into the business end of a gun and in a split second could have become another statistic in Jamaica’s brutal killing fields that have accounted for several thousand lives in the last three decades.

But the bloody 1980 General Election, which accounted for over 850 political murders by police records, almost took Neita in its lethal wave.

“I was with some guys who were campaigning. It was in the heat of the 1980 General Election when a man came out of a yard and pointed a gun at me,” Neita told the Jamaica Observer of admittedly his most frightening ordeal to date.

He had known the man, whose friends he had represented in legal matters in court, and was taken aback that he had become the subject of a potentially dangerous situation.

“I was travelling in a car with some other guys along Red Hills Road and one of them told my driver to stop the car because he needed to go into a yard,” Neita recounted.

“The guy went inside, while we waited outside; and while I was seated in the car, this man came out with a gun in his hand and aimed at me. He said to me, ‘Mr Neita, you bring man fi fight me,’ at which point I replied ‘what are you talking about, I bring which man?’, and he tried to fire a shot, but the gun stuck,” Neita related.

“My driver then drove off and the man walked off. I was shocked, but it happened so quickly. Apparently, there was a conflict that I didn’t know about,” Neita said.

However, the man who had exited Neita’s car and had gone inside the yard, was murdered seconds after.

“He went into the yard, got into a confrontation, because he and the other guys were from different political sides, and got his throat slashed. He had not gone there to offer any violence, but instead to promote peace, and instead got killed,” Neita said.

The killing occurred off Blissett Avenue, near Red Hills Boulevard.

That incident has remained indelibly etched in Neita’s mind.

Nothing has since come close to that narrow escape, thanks to the malfunctioning gun, although other incidents during later election campaigns reminded him that he could not take chances.

In the 1993 General Election, when he ran unsuccessfully for the People’s National Party in North East Manchester against the Jamaica Labour Party’s Audley Shaw, one of Neita’s campaign vehicles, loaned to the team by a well-known PNP businessman in Central Jamaica, was intercepted, damaged and then set ablaze by men he assumed to be JLP supporters.

A few stone-throwing incidents on the day of the election, too, kept the famed attorney on his toes.

However, the most blatant and potentially harmful stone-throwing incident occurred 14 years later while Neita was helping with the campaign of PNP candidate Paul Lyn, who went up against Shaw in the same North East Manchester constituency.

“In the 2007 election, they threw a stone in the vehicle that I was in. Patrick Atkinson (now attorney general and MP for Trelawny North) was also in the car with me, along with Paul Lyn, when we had gone into Devon, which is a stronghold of the JLP.

“When we drove in, there were a few PNP supporters, but a whole lot of Labourites. When we were coming out, a man flung a huge stone that shattered the windshield and a few splinters got in my eye. Naturally it was cause for concern. My driver got out of there quickly,” he stated.

Although accustomed to hearing gunshots while he traversed sections of the Corporate Area, Neita also vividly remembered an incident in the South St Andrew inner-city community of Wilton Gardens, popularly called Rema, where the famed Boys’ Town organisation is located.

“One night during early 2000, I was down Boys’ Town, where I used to have a youth club that Locksley Comrie and myself used to run. I had invited some people from uptown, from whom I was trying to solicit contributions, when a barrage of shots [were heard] outside.

“Although we were all shaken up and concerned, what struck me most about that incident is the immediate, instinctive reaction of the children. They all ran and took cover, as if they were in a drill. I said that it was a conditional reflex.”

The Boys’ Town association with Neita and his family had several years before been snapped by an incident during the 1970s, when Neita’s oldest son, Mark, a former Kingston College, Wolmer’s and Jamaica cricketer, had his brief stint at the club cut short by a violent incident.

The talented right-handed batsman Mark, at age 11, had represented Boys’ Town at Senior Cup cricket, even before he started playing for KC in the junior ‘Colts’ and Sunlight Cup competitions.

“Mark used to play cricket for Boys’ Town and one day while we were there, I saw a client of mine named Hall, who we used to call El Fego Baca. He was from the area, but went up to Payne Land with some others to live later on.

“He was an original Rema man, but he came down to Boys’ Town one day while I was there and (former Boys’ Town and Jamaica footballer) Devon ‘Roots’ Lewis called me and asked me to speak to Hall, to tell him that he should leave because it was dangerous for him to be there.

“I begged Hall to listen to Devon’s advice, as it seemed to be sound, but he turned to me and said ‘nobody can’t trouble me, man. Me born and grow down here’.

“So while Melbourne were playing Boys’ Town in cricket, I heard bow, bow, bow and a crowd gathered.

“Hall was there at the ground and had started to play football with the guys on the netball court. When he got the ball on the right wing and was running down, a man just came up and shot him. After that my wife said ‘no way’, and that’s how Mark stopped playing for Boys’ Town and went to Melbourne,” said Neita, a star forward on Kingston College’s Manning Cup teams of the 1950s.

For the noted Queen’s Counsel too, the experience in the Leeward Island country of Antigua & Barbuda in 1987 when he had an unwanted and uninvited guest in his bedroom brought an ounce of fear that he did not expect in a land that did not have a history of such crimes.

Tourists in Antigua are usually not targeted for robbery and other criminal acts, but the incident unsettled his wife and himself and forced them to take a closer look at what was on offer.

“I was staying with my wife at the White Heron Hotel outside St John’s. We were occupying a room on the second floor and I woke up in the middle of the night to find a man dressed in shorts in the room. He jumped downstairs and ran away when I raised an alarm. But while the Antiguan police were professional, the hotel’s management wasn’t. Of course, the hotel closed down sometime after that, I think because of the attitude of the people who ran it.”

Neita has been criticised in some circles for his stout defence of several well-known gangsters of the past, among them names which caused fear in the hearts of many people.

He maintained that although he knew countless bad men from the 1960s into recent times, it did not assure him safety in the eyes of other gangsters, nor did it allow him to feel that he was in a secured world, a virtual untouchable.

In defence of those whom he represented, Neita said that every citizen had a right to legal representation, despite whatever public perception of him existed.

Among those whom he defended were Dennis ‘Copper’ Barth, Anthony Brown, ‘Biah’ Mitchell, Maloney Gordon, Junior ‘Little Junior’ Thompson, Trevor ‘Burrie Boy’ Blake, Glenford ‘Dillinger’ Pusey, Claudius Massop, George ‘Feathermop’ Spence, Franklyn ‘Chubby Dread’ Allen, and others known by the aliases Uzi, and Blinks.

“My responsibility was to defend any man who came and retained my services,” said Neita. “My job was only as an advocate. I never thought about a sense of security defending these guys. I just thought about it as doing my job and giving it my best shot. I won a lot of cases, but sometimes I lost, and that’s how it is. When I came back to Jamaica from England as a barrister, it was in the heat of the 1967 election. That’s how I met a lot of these guys, as they were (former Cabinet minister) Dudley Thompson’s supporters, and I started to represent them.

“If you are a criminals’ lawyer, and emphasis on criminals’ lawyer, not criminal, then those are the people that you are going to defend. Those are the people who live outside the pale of the law; those are the people who are imperiled by prosecution, who else are you going to defend?

“The upright, moral citizen of unquestionable reputation and unimpeachable virtue is not going to be charged with criminal offences, unless it’s white collar offences sometimes, so you have to defend those people,” he said.

“I like criminal law, I always have, it’s more exciting. I like the opportunity to address juries and try and persuade them. I like to cross-examine, so having chosen that, it follows ineluctably that that it what I would do.

“I had a very traumatic experience when my brother-in-law, Stephen McLean, was robbed and murdered in 1976, but that never deterred me from serving as a lawyer, because it’s my chosen job; my vocation, this is what I want to do. I still believe in the principle of the presumption of innocence, and I believe that every man is entitled to a defence. However, it must be done with integrity in the sense that you must not interfere with the process and you should not put a witness in the witness box to tell a lie.

“You should not be an investigator to determine the man’s guilt or innocence, because you are usurping the functions of the jury. You represent him based on his instructions. Sometimes you don’t believe his instructions, but that is neither here nor there, because you could be wrong too.

“I had a case once where I was trying to persuade a man to take a guilty plea, because the case seemed to have been overwhelming, and the man said ‘I am not pleading guilty, Mr Neita.’ I never took it, and we went and batted and won in the long run,” he stated.

Neita received no real threats on his life in later years, and continues to be heartened by the view that although some people do not always like to see him defending certain individuals, respect for his work is shown.

“I have never really been a victim of threats, because people have said to me, ‘Mr Neita, I know that you are doing your job’.

“Sometime ago I was representing a woman in Trelawny, who along with her boyfriend, had been charged with murder. The man who was killed was a community man suspected to have been involved in drugs and he provided for the community, so it was the usual thing — he was lord and master.

“When I went to represent her, there was a big crowd there and one woman in particular, who I understood to be the obeah woman, was dressed in lime green and stirred up the crowd against the accused but then came over to me and said ‘Mr Neita, no worry, you are doing your work’.

“Every time the case was mentioned, the woman would turn up, they called her the White Witch of Rose Hall, and there was always a crowd on the outside.

“I managed to get bail for my client and asked that the matter be heard in another town.

“The people were saying ‘yes, them bring them big lawyer from town because them have money’ and all sorts of things. The matter was heard in Montego Bay and the woman was acquitted,” Neita said.