It was about 20 years ago but he still remembers vividly the first two times he reluctantly served as a juror. He still recalls being in the unenviable position of foreman and the accused murderer on trial accosting him within the court’s precincts as he hurried back from lunch, appearing to bump into him but staying long enough to whisper “Do something fah mi”.

“I was hurrying to get back before the judge was ready. This was the St Catherine Court. I tend to walk with my head down but as I was walking, I noticed someone was coming in my direction; I tried to avoid the person but the more I did, it was like the person was coming into me,” he tells the Jamaica Observer.

It was the accused, who was free to roam because he had been out on bail, and he wanted the foreman to persuade his peers to return a not guilty verdict.

“I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t stop to engage. He said something like, I must do something for him and let him go home to his family. I didn’t say a word to him,” the man relates.

The source, who says he was prompted to revisit the experience given the furore about jury tampering and its unwholesome influence on Jamaica’s legal system following the Privy Council’s seminal ruling in the appeal of entertainer Adidja “Vybz Kartel” Palmer and his co-accused, argues it is too little, too late.

“There is no reason the system shouldn’t have been fixed from a long time ago. Having gone there and experienced, I don’t believe in the jury system. Having gone there and seen how the system can be corrupted, if you don’t have quality people it [the process] will be unfair,” the trusted source, whose identity is being withheld tells the Sunday Observer.

In hindsight he says, apart from being shocked, he really had no inkling about how to deal with the situation, as jurors had not been briefed on how to handle any such experience.

In this respect he says he can sympathise with the forewoman in the much-publicised Kartel trial who, after being approached by another member of the jury, canvassed the other jurors to see who else had been before telling court officials.

“I hear commentators saying that the Kartel forewoman should not have investigated what happened with the corrupt juror, but the thing about it is, we were not told if such thing happens what to do. What saved the day, in my case, was I was along with a senior officer and I told her what happened with the accused and she asked if persons saw him talking to me.

“She said this is a serious matter, you should report it to the clerk of the court… because someone could have seen the interaction and reported you. So, the next day I went to court, I told the rest of jurors and about four of them they said yes, the accused came to them too,” he relates.

Though fearful, he says they reported the matter to the clerk of court who relayed it to the judge. The jury, however, was not dismissed.

“They took us to a room, we said what happened, they recorded it and we went back into the trial,” he tells the Sunday Observer.

In the end, the accused was freed of the murder charge because his attorney successfully argued that he had acted in self-defence.

He, however, did not walk free as the complaint of the jurors saw him being arrested and charged for seeking to pervert the course of justice.

Years later a chance meeting with the accused, who had served time, threw into sharp relief the issue of exposure where jurors are concerned.

“Some years later I was walking in Spanish Town one night and I heard somebody say ‘If yuh want to live yuh must give bly’. The person repeated it about two more times, so I sorta looked around a little. It was the same man. He didn’t see me for about three years and he made me out from behind. He stretched out his hands and said ‘A yuh juror bwoy mi a talk, a you send mi go a prison’,” the source recalls.

The chilling experience, he says, remained with him.

“I would say find a way to protect people. If I live in St Andrew I don’t believe I should go to a court in St Andrew and be a juror, and the trial should be done speedily so people can get back to their normal life,” he says.

Furthermore, he argues that the inadequacy of court facilities pose a safety concern.

“The judge and court staff should not mingle with the family members of accused persons. Jurors and witnesses should not have to be mingling with the accused. When you are on trial they know where to find you. The accused and their family know who you are so sometimes, out of fear, even if someone doesn’t want to take a bribe they will,” he tells the
Sunday Observer.

How jurors are selected is another sore point, he says. Jurors are not summoned for specific cases but are called for a particular period and placed in a pool from which they are then empanelled for different cases after orientation.

Court Administration Division is responsible for issuing summonses to people for jury duty. Summonses are issued to the police for distribution to selected citizens who are expected to report to the court specified in the summons, on the date stipulated. Failing to turn up for jury duty when summoned can result in a fine not exceeding $10,000.

But according to our source, things don’t always go according to the book.

“I was summoned by the police, and I was selected as a juror. I didn’t want to go but you know, if you don’t go it is a criminal offence. I was objected to about four or five times by defence lawyers after I disclosed what I did for a living [during empanelling]. They prefer persons who are illiterate. How they accepted me now, they couldn’t find a panel, the judge sent the police superintendent to find jurors; it was an emergency now, [so] the judge asked the man to go on the street to find people. The wider public don’t know what is happening, but the authorities know,” he alleges.

The case to be tried in this instance, he says, was a rape matter which subsequently collapsed after the victim decided she could not go through with the trial because of the memories. The judge transitioned the panel of jurors to the murder matter.

“There is no reason the system should have been fixed from a long time ago. People will tell you they are professional jurors who go around and get themselves empanelled. Although I don’t believe in the system, if we are to have it we need to fix it. The fine for corrupting the system should be much more than what it is to deter people. The people who the lawyers prefer, if you put the system in the hands of those people you can have just about anything like what we saw at the Privy Council a few days ago,” he states further.

“The authorities must fix the thing a way, increase the penalties and do something like what they have in England where if anything happens, they can dismiss the jury and continue with the judge alone. The jury system is a mockery as it currently is; if it is going to continue, they must find a way to include people who can think,” he insists.

In quashing the murder convictions of Vybz Kartel and his co-accused Shawn “Shawn Storm” Campbell, Kahira Jones, and Andre St John for the 2011 murder of Clive “Lizard” Williams and placing the question of a retrial back in the lap of Jamaica’s Appeal Court, the British law lords pointed out that judges, under the United Kingdom Jury Act, can dismiss a corrupted jury and try a case alone.

The issue of whether Supreme Court Judge Justice Lennox Campbell, who had tried the four men, should have dismissed the jury upon learning that one juror had been tainted, was one of three points the Privy Council had been asked to rule on and has been seen as the main reason the convictions were found to be unstable.

The law lords, in their ruling, said the decision by the original trial judge to continue the murder trial after the attempted bribe of the jury had been brought to his attention “gave rise to a miscarriage of justice”.

Law Lord Lloyd-Jones, in delivering the ruling, said the board was of the view that the tainted juror, whom the Privy Council referred to as “Juror X”, should not have been kept on the jury.

“There was a need to isolate the other members of the jury from the source of contamination. In the board’s view, allowing Juror X to continue to serve on the jury is fatal to the safety of the convictions which followed. This was an infringement of the defendants’ fundamental right to a fair hearing by an independent and impartial court in accordance with Section 16 of Chapter III of the Jamaican Constitution,” he stated.

Commenting further on the issue, Lord Lloyd-Jones said, while the board is “mindful of the very serious consequences which may flow from having to discharge a jury shortly before the end of a long and complex criminal trial, it is also very conscious of the danger of deliberate attempts to derail criminal trials, in particular in their closing stages, by engineering situations in which it becomes necessary to discharge the jury”.

“In England and Wales, legislation now provides that, in certain circumstances, it is permitted to discharge a jury because of jury tampering and to continue the trial without a jury but by judge alone. However, in the absence of such a provision — and there is no such provision in Jamaica — there will be occasions on which, as in the present case, a court will have no alternative but to discharge a jury and end the trial in order to protect the integrity of the system of trial by jury,” he stated.

Palmer and his co-accused were accused of killing Williams on August 16, 2011 after he failed to return two unlicensed firearms which Palmer had allegedly given to him for safe keeping. Williams has not been seen since and his body has never been found.

Eight weeks into the trial, one of the original 12 jurors had been discharged due to “a personal difficulty” leaving 11 jurors on the case. On March 13, 2014, the final day of the judge’s summation, he was notified that a juror had attempted to bribe others by offering $500,000 to give a not guilty verdict. After investigating the allegation and considering it with the Crown and the defence, the judge ruled that the trial should proceed. The jury later that day, by a majority of 10 to 1, convicted the men.

In April 2014, Kartel was sentenced to life in prison with the eligibility of parole after serving 35 years of his sentence. His co-accused were also handed life sentences — with Shawn Storm and Jones being eligible for parole after serving 25 years, and St John being eligible after serving 15 years.

In April 2020, following an appeal, the men’s parole times were reduced by two-and-a-half years each.

In September that same year the men were granted conditional leave to challenge their murder convictions before the Privy Council.

Earlier this month, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck indicated that he would be establishing a joint select committee of Parliament to look at the Jury Act “to see how we can widen it, and probably to assess the chief justice’s position that you should have bench trials”.