Thinking men and women will readily understand why Mr Tom Tavares-Finson, King’s Counsel, welcomed the Court of Appeal ruling that freed dancehall star Mr Adidja “Vybz Kartel” Palmer and his co-accused of their murder charge.

Given the option by the United Kingdom Privy Council, the Jamaican Court of Appeal decided against a retrial of the defendants allowing them to leave prison after 13 years.

That is after the UK Court — Jamaica’s court of last resort — quashed the murder convictions on March 4, 2024 on the grounds that the trial judge did not take into consideration a last-minute revelation of an effort to taint the jury pool to get a not-guilty verdict.

Senator Tavares-Finson, a former lead attorney for Mr Palmer, in welcoming the ruling to free the entertainer, said: “…I believe the judgment is in the interest of justice and lends credibility to the various objections which Kartel’s defence team had raised at trial.

“…I think the fair treatment of this kind of high-profile matter by the Privy Council is another reason why many Jamaicans, including myself, support its retention as our country’s final appellate court,” the attorney added.

Mr Tavares-Finson hit the nail squarely on the head. Given the trajectory on which the case was moving, had it not been taken to the UK Privy Council, Jamaica’s jurisprudence could have ended up with a bad situation. The case could have been finalised with acceptance of the tainted jury pool as precedence and with all its terrible legal consequences.

We have said often enough in this space that Jamaica is not yet ready to leave the Privy Council, because our justice system is not yet of the level of maturity that would allow the population to have the requisite confidence in it.

As another senior attorney, Ms Valerie Neita-Robertson, who has been in the belly of the beast, told us in a column in this newspaper two years ago:

“Whilst becoming a republic is a politically charged issue with our political opponents scrambling over each other in the quest to garner notoriety and political points, we must not lose sight of the more important issue; that is, the delivery of justice to each and every Jamaican regardless of who they are.

“Those of us who support the retention of the Privy Council are not anti-Jamaican or anti-black; we abhor slavery and all the trappings, but justice does not wear the colours of race, gender, or class. Justice is universal and not territorial.”

It is not to say that Kartel and his co-accused were innocent. That is not for us to decide here. Unthinking people are distracted by the excitement of a popular entertainer whose case has gone viral. But it is really about protecting the integrity of the law upon which we must depend to dispense justice.

We are a small society in which cultural, social, and political biases exist and we have a reluctance to offend politicians or people who hold high offices and wield political power even when they are obviously wrong.

We need to be confident that our disputes are not going to be adjudicated within our region by people who are influenced by these biases, as those are not considerations which should affect or even determine justice.

The Caribbean Court of Justice’s time has just not yet come. And, as our forebears tell us: “Nothing before the time.”