THE local appellate court yesterday turned down Norma Von Cork’s request for leave to go to the United Kingdom-based Privy Council to challenge her conviction for conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the Bernal/Moore drug smuggling case.

The unanimous decision by Appeal Court president Ian Forte Q C and justices Seymour Panton and Neville Clarke were based on the same reason, namely that the issues on which Von Cork was appealing did not involve any important points of law that needed to be resolved in the public’s interest.

The issues that Von Cork wanted to put to the Privy Council were, in short, a complaint that the indictment accusing her didn’t disclose an offence that was known to law.

This complaint was based on the wording of the particulars of the indictment which accused Von Cork of conspiring with four other men to pervert the course of justice by setting up a man named Radcliffe Orr to enter a false plea guilty to a slew of drug-smuggling charges in order to cast doubt on the validity of the previous convictions of Brian Bernal and his one-time friend, Christopher Moore.

“(There is no existing offence in law that reads) perverting the course of justice in order to cast doubt on the validity of a conviction,” Henriques argued.

Paula Llwellyn, a senior counsel in the Director of Public Prosecution’s office, tried to explain that defence counsel R N A Henriques’ point was invalid as the offence stated in the indictment was a conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice. “The part about casting doubt on the validity of the convictions of Brian Bernal and Christopher Moore were merely describing the aim of the conspiracy,” she said.

The judges agreed and concluded that Henriques’ point simply did not fulfil any of the necessary criteria for qualifying for leave to pursue a final appeal to Jamaica’s highest legal authority.

Citing previous judgments outlining the criteria, Justice Forte said: “Leave to appeal is granted in cases where some clear departure from the requirements of justice exists; a grave injustice has been done by a disregard of the forms of legal process or by some violation of the principles of natural justice or otherwise; the grounds of appeal sustain the appeal itself…I find myself unable to say that this (Von Cork’s) would be such a case.”

His words, which were more or less echoed by the other judges, signalled the end of their involvement in the case which, in 1994, began with the arrests of the sons of Jamaica’s former ambassador to Washington and Christopher Moore, a businessman, for plotting to smuggle 96 tins of marijuana disguised as pineapple juice to the United States.

Those arrests, which resulted in the convictions of Moore and Brian Bernal, the older son, subsequently led to the convictions in 2000 of Von Cork and a group of men who were found guilty of trying to pervert the course of justice by setting up Orr to plead guilty to the charges for which Moore and Bernal had been convicted.

However, Henriques, who led the team that tried and failed to convince the local Appeal Court to quash Von Cork’s conviction, said it wasn’t over.

“This isn’t the end of this,” he said with a brilliant smile as he made his way out of the courtroom. He wouldn’t pause to explain himself, but his words are being interpreted as an intention to approach the Privy Council using the more expensive route of a special petition.

In the meantime, Von Cork, who went to jail two weeks after her appeal against the conviction was dismissed by the local Appeal Court, will continue serving her one-year prison sentence.

And by the time the special petition — if one really materialises — is heard, she would have already served her sentence.