With just under eight months remaining before she steps away from her role as Jamaica’s first female director of public prosecutions (DPP) and the longest in the post, a battle-tested Paula Vanessa Llewellyn, King’s Counsel — who has stared down from death threats to a court-waged war to unceremoniously thrust her from office — is determined that the organisation she inherited with one computer and 20 prosecutors will be a standard-bearer for others in the region.

The legal veteran had been on a hiatus from April last year after the ruling of an all-woman Full Court which held that while a 2023 amendment increasing the retirement age of the DPP from 60 to 65 is constitutional, a new provision introduced into the constitution via a second amendment giving the DPP the right to elect to remain in office is “not a valid section and is severed from the constitution”. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Opposition People’s National Party.

Following a swiftly filed appeal by the Government, the Appeal Court in December said it had determined that the incumbent DPP “automatically benefited” from the extension granted by the second amendment thereby clearing the way for Llewellyn to remain in her post until she is 65.

Speaking with the Jamaica Observer a week after she officially resumed her duties this month, following the ruling, the DPP says she is focused on “transition management between now and September” and putting the finishing touches to the three projects which had been the basis for her first request for an extension in office when she turned 60 in 2020.

“That original extension was to facilitate my critical input into the completion of the renovations of the office; secondly the prosecution, as an office, of what was the biggest gang case in the Caribbean; and unification/administrative control of the clerk of courts who are the prosecutors in the lower courts being taken from the office of the chief justice where it now resides and transmitted to the director of public prosecutions,” Llewellyn told the Sunday Observer.

With all but the unification project complete, Llewellyn said her office is “now in the middle of leadership and management training” to facilitate that takeover.

“When that is complete, what it will mean is that the DPP’s office will assume total administrative control for all 66 clerk of courts who operate as prosecutors out of the parish courts. Why it is critical is that it would facilitate the Office of the DPP being able to have many more opportunities of training interaction between our office and the clerk of courts. Training will facilitate enhancement of knowledge and their exposure to much more experienced prosecutors, it will facilitate more immediate and hands-on management of the clerk of courts and their interest as prosecutors than what they currently have,” the highly respected prosecutor stated.

“What is recognised many years ago is that it is an anomaly for senior parish court judges and the chief justice to be in charge of the prosecutors. Prosecutors are always supposed to be independent. We have a role, judges have a role. How it is now, it is the parish court judges who are administratively in charge of them, meaning that they do their evaluation, so sometimes it can be awkward. But what we would be interested in is providing an environment to enhance their knowledge capital, their prosecutorial capacity, and their capabilities in terms of judgment-making in many different areas of criminal practice,” she explained.

Those finishing touches aside, Llewellyn says in her 16-plus years as director the office has morphed into “one of the pre-eminent prosecutorial departments in the Caribbean” in more ways than one.

“I’ve moved the number of legal staff from 20-odd when I became DPP to 70, given the tripling of the volume of work…We are one of the pre-eminent prosecutorial departments in the Caribbean by virtue of the fact that not only have we maintained handling of all matters consistently, irrespective of their complexity, no matter what the complexity is, we prosecute the matters ourselves. We appear in the Court of Appeal in all matters for ourselves,” she noted.

“In Trinidad, for example, a lot of their complex matters are prosecuted by members of the private bar. Representation of the Crown is on fiat by members of the private bar at the Court of Appeal in most of their matters. In Belize only the DPP and maybe one of her seniors go to the appeal court,” she said, while adding that her office is the only one of its kind in the Caribbean which has units devoted to anti-gang, extradition, financial crimes, digital and cyber-crimes.

“All that is part of my legacy. When I took over the DPP’s office there were no computers, there was one in the library, everybody else used a typewriter, now all Crown counsel are given a laptop and a closed user group (CUG handset) as tools of their trade. There was one air-conditioning unit, and I had to work very hard to extract resources, now the entire building is fully air-conditioned,” she noted.

She said the building, which has also been tripled in size, despite being recently shuttered because of a mold problem, is nonetheless “state-of-the-art”.

“I have been to several prosecutors’ offices all over the Caribbean and Jamaica’s is the biggest and the best in terms of how it has been outfitted. It is unfortunate that we have this mold situation occurring, it has been indicated to us that all being well, it should take 16 weeks to complete the rehabilitation,” Llewellyn said.

In the meantime, she said her office, which was kept steady in her absence by Senior Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Claudette Thompson, has embarked on digitising all its files and will be revamping its website and seeking to add a few more posts.

“I will try to go full speed ahead to craft a justification to get a communications director on my establishment, and that particular individual will seek to ensure that in the spirit of transparency and accountability we have a dedicated communications director who will be responsible for preparing releases on high public interest matters and perhaps, along with a committee that we have in-house, continuing to populate the website as well as operate social media arm[s] under very strict conditions to give information,” the DPP said,.

“We also need to craft a justification for a maintenance officer who will see to the day-to-day maintenance and upkeep of the building, given that we have tripled the size,” she added.

As far as their work within the courts are concerned, Llewellyn has no fears on that side.

“There are about eight or nine gang matters presently before the courts and a couple in the pipeline. Having really got into the nitty gritty of best practice in what it takes to properly prosecute a gang matter when we prosecuted the Klansman case, we have the template and more and more our staff are being introduced into enhancing their capacity. We have a very, very vibrant anti-gang unit and members of that unit have been invited to other Caribbean islands to make presentations on gang prosecutions. We are recognised,” she declared.

The St Hugh’s High School alumna — who during her stellar career has held her own in court battles in which she faced the cream of Jamaica’s King’s Counsel the likes of former Prime Minister PJ Patterson; Winston Spaulding; Lord Anthony Gifford; Headley Cunningham; Velma Hylton; Patrick Atkinson; Dr Lloyd Barnett; and Delroy Chuck and who has triumphed in cases featuring underworld figures — had parting words for those who kept vigil during her court-induced break.

“I again wish to reiterate my thanks to the members of the public — the response, the support, the prayers, not only from members of my staff but from members of the public, a lot of people I don’t know from every walk of life, in terms of giving me the support to go through what I considered to be just yet another challenging circumstance in my career of which there have been many. But the smile has always remained intact and my back has remained broad throughout the process and I recommit to be, as usual, transparent, accountable, and fair but fearless in the public interest for the time I have remaining before I demit office,” Llewellyn stated with her signature chuckle.

Llewellyn, who completed law school in 1984, was appointed in the position of clerk of court in the St James Resident Magistrate’s Court that same year. From there she was promoted to Crown counsel at the Office of the DPP and within seven years was appointed deputy DPP.

In 1999, she became the first woman to act in the position of director, and in 2003 became the first female to be appointed in the position of senior deputy DPP. She was appointed DPP in March 2008. Unlike previous DPPs, who had been appointed simply on the recommendation of the prime minister, she had to apply through a competitive selection process administered by the Public Service Commission.