EDITORIAL - Too long on the pot, Mr Witter

Earl Witter, the public defender, is a smart guy and streetwise lawyer. He would know the saying about what people should do if they sit idly on the pot for too long in their bedchamber.

We offer that advice to Mr Witter. That is in regard to his report on the Tivoli Gardens bloody firefight two years ago.

The community of Tivoli Gardens is the power base of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and of which the mobster and enforcer, Christopher Coke, used to be overlord.

In May 2010, after nearly a year of attempting to wiggle its way out of having to extradite Coke to America to answer gun and drug-trafficking charges, the then JLP administration relented. Coke, however, would not go quietly.

Instead, his henchmen and supporters barricaded the community and engaged the security forces in gun battles. During the fighting, the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) fired mortar rounds, but insists the use was diversionary. Combatants were not targeted.

Coke, if he was in Tivoli Gardens during the battle, escaped, but 73 civilians - and one soldier - died. There are claims that many of those deaths were unwarranted and, in fact, were blatantly extrajudicial killings by the security forces.

"Over 50 of the people who were killed were innocent people - bystanders, civilians," Edward Seaga, the former prime minister and ex-MP for West Kingston and the man who orchestrated the development of Tivoli, claimed last week.

On what basis Mr Seaga asserts that number is not clear. It is a fact, though, that while the vast majority of Jamaicans believe that the security forces acted legitimately to turn back a challenge to the Jamaican state, many people were uncomfortable with the number of people who were killed in the operation. There are also questions about whether the security forces adhered to declared and appropriate rules of engagement.

It is in the context of these concerns that the former prime minister, Bruce Golding, in the aftermath of the Tivoli incursion, asked the public defender to investigate the killings. That was 27 months ago.

SLOW PACE

There was logic to the decision to engage Mr Witter. As a commission of Parliament, the Office of the Public Defender is supposed to pursue the interests of persons whose constitutional rights have been abridged by the state.

Initially, Mr Witter complained about the slow pace at which the ballistic laboratory tested and produced reports on the many firearms used in the engagement. That constraint appears to have passed.

Yet, in recent months, Mr Witter has consistently shifted the deadline for the delivery of his report. The last one should have been by the end of July, before Parliament went on recess.

Mr Witter did not deliver. He asked for more time.

The precise cause of these latest delays has not been made clear. Instead, Mr Witter waffles.

If Mr Witter cannot complete the assignment, or do it in a timely fashion, maybe he should move over and allow someone else to get on with it. For as they say, justice delayed is justice denied.

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