The Appeal Court last month gave the reasons for its 2021 decision upholding the sentence and conviction of a former Jamaica Public Service (JPS) Company employee for extortion by a parish court judge.

The man, who was convicted in March 2017, had been sentenced to a fine of $100,000 or three months’ imprisonment at hard labour. The Appeal Court, in delivering its reasons for ordering that the decision should stand, said, “There was enough evidence for the learned judge to have arrived at the verdict at which he did and there is no basis for that verdict to be disturbed”.

The facts of the case as presented by the Crown are that in June 2010, the man, then a JPS employee, went to the premises of the complainant and informed her that he was there to take out her JPS meter. She permitted him to enter her house. After making checks and realising that there was electricity in the house, powering her freezer and television set, whilst her meter was not registering the use of electricity, the worker exclaimed: “Is prison work this.”

He then informed the woman that for what he had observed, “Is $50,000 if you go to court” before asking her “what can you do for me?”

When the woman asked him what he meant by that he responded: “Give me $20,000” and stated that he was working with the police before taking out his cellular telephone as if to make a call.

The woman, in her evidence, said she gave him $15,000 from money that she had to pay her rent.

According to the prosecution, the JPS worker, when leaving, instructed the woman not to tell her neighbours about what had taken place between them. A note was, however, made of the licence plate of the vehicle that the worker was driving and a report made to the landlord. The woman’s son [who was a witness to what had occurred] informed the JPS of what the worker had done. The woman and her son later went to the nearby police station where, in the presence of other JPS personnel, the worker denied taking any money from her. The sum of $15,000 was taken from his wallet in the same denominations that the woman told the police that they were in.

The man, during the trial, denied her version of the event.

The judges of the appeal, in assessing whether the words spoken by the worker amounted to an expressed demand, said, “The menace was the threat of arrest and prosecution seen in the words ‘Is prison work this’; ‘Is $50,000 if yu go a court’; ‘I am working with the police’.

“There is enough of an implicit demand and menace to make it irrefutable that the conviction is properly grounded,” the appeal court judges said.

Attorneys for the former JPS worker had contended in three grounds that the trial judge had erred in finding that the ingredients of the offence of extortion were proven based on the evidence and in ruling that there was a case to answer. They had also contended that the verdict was unreasonable, given the evidence and what they held were the inconsistencies in the Crown’s case.