Incarcerated former gang leader Joel Andem has filed an amended notice of application seeking to have Jamaica’s highest court reinstate his appeal against his 2009 conviction on gun charges for which he is serving 20 years.

The appeal which Andem is seeking to have reinstated stems from the decision of then Supreme Court Judge Justice Paulette Williams after a trial in the Gun Court during which the Crown alleged that sometime in 2001 Andem fired shots at a policeman in Kintyre, St Andrew. Justice Williams, after finding him guilty on charges of shooting with intent and illegal possession of a firearm, sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment, ordering that the sentence run consecutive to a previous 20-year term he was at the time serving.

The application for Andem, who is now virtually at the end of that previous 20-year sentence for gun charges for which he was convicted in 2005, was registered on the January 12 hearing list of the Court of Appeal for this year before Appeal Court President Justice Marva McDonald-Bishop sitting alongside Justice Kissock Laing and Acting Judge of Appeal Justice Carolyn Tie-Powell (who is acting). He is being represented by attorney John Clarke.

This is not the first time Andem has sought to have the Court of Appeal review the status of his incarceration. In 2007 he made a failed attempt to have the Appeal Court quash his 2005 conviction handed down by the High Court division of the Gun Court in Kingston on two counts of an indictment which charged illegal possession of firearm and shooting with intent during an encounter with a police party at Skyline Drive, St Andrew, in January 2002.

In that instance he had been sentenced to a term of 10 years’ imprisonment at hard labour for the first count and 20 years at hard labour for the other. Andem, in appealing that decision in 2007 when the matter was heard, had argued that the then trial judge erred in not disqualifying himself from trying him.

According to Andem, the judge knew, or ought to have known that on an earlier occasion, in trying his common-law spouse and the mother of his child who was before the courts on illegal possession of ammunition charges, the judge “made unfair, adverse and biased comments against” him. He contended that those comments and their obvious bias and danger of bias must have prejudiced the case against him and breached his constitutional right to a fair hearing by an impartial judge, contrary to section 20 (1) of the Jamaica Constitution.

However, the court, in turning down that appeal, said “obvious bias did not arise in the case” and focused its attention on whether or not the comments were such to establish that there was “danger of bias” resulting in the breach of Andem’s constitutional right to a fair hearing by an impartial judge.

It further said that the trial judge did not — from his own assessment, or inclination or predisposition — depict Andem as being notorious.

“This depiction had long existed and was of the widest currency,” the court declared in that ruling. It noted further that the initial enquiry of the learned judge was as to the identification of the Joel Andem mentioned in the antecedent report. “Thereafter, the Andem factor was a consideration and only that as to the determination of the proper sentence to be imposed on [the common law spouse]”, that tribunal held.

Furthermore, it said, “From time to time judges have to preside over cases where the accused has a national unsavoury reputation of which a trial judge would obviously be aware. It cannot be that such awareness of an accused person’s notoriety would automatically lead to a conclusion that there would be a real “danger of bias” in respect of that trial judge.

“If mere awareness was a criterion, this would be tantamount to advising those of the criminal bent to seek notoriety and thereafter seek the disqualification of a judge for an expressed or implied awareness,” the Court of Appeal said at that time in stating that all the circumstances demonstrated that the trial judge at the time (now retired Court of Appeal President Justice Patrick Brooks), “was aware (like almost everyone in Jamaica) that Joel Andem had a notorious reputation”.

“The appeal is dismissed, the convictions and sentences are affirmed, the sentences are to commence on the 9th February, 2006,” the tribunal ruled then.

Andem, after four years on the run, was captured in May 2004 by police and soldiers during an operation in Clarksonville, a rural farming community in St Ann close to the border with Clarendon. The then 41-year-old, who was reputedly the leader of the Gideon Warriors Gang, had been described by police as a semi-literate who had many brushes with the law, his first being a six-month sentence for larceny in 1983.

Before his arrest Andem grabbed the headlines and caused much anxiety and consternation among law-abiding citizens and law enforcers.

He was described by past Police Commissioner Francis Forbes as “operating like an urban-type guerilla”.

The expanded Court of Appeal building on King Street in downtown Kingston.