State ordered to pay over $1.8M to six men held in prison building

Senior Reporter

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A decision to transfer six men on remand to a dilapidated and overcrowded building at the Maximum Security Prison in Arouca is set to cost the State more than $1.8 million.

In a judgment delivered last week, High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad upheld the men’s claims challenging their transfer and the conditions in which they were detained.

Justice Rampersad awarded each man between $248,000 and $374,500 in compensation, based on the length of time he spent in the building before being transferred. One of the men, Stefon Austin, died in custody while the case was pending. His mother was substituted as a claimant and will receive his compensation.

On July 24, 2021, Austin, Ayokie Charles, Kerry Valentino, Brent Johnson, Joshua Janet and Darrel Dias were transferred to the Wayne Jackson Building, also known as Building 13, at the prison.

Through their attorneys, led by Vincent Patterson, the men claimed they were subjected to inhumane conditions, including being denied medical care.

They were relocated on different dates between December 2022 and April 2023. All except Austin remain on remand in prison while awaiting trial.

Justice Rampersad had to decide whether the transfer was an irregular and improper exercise of the then-Prisons Commissioner’s discretion under the Prison Act to move prisoners between facilities.

The judge noted that the then-Prisons Commissioner had refused to disclose his reasons for transferring the men, citing national security concerns.

A blanket assertion that the commissioner had acted properly did not help the court decide the issue, Justice Rampersad said.

“The court is therefore left without any evidential foundation upon which it could conclude that the considerations advanced by the claimants were weighed, or that the decision struck a balance that was rationally open to the Prisons Commissioner,” he said.

Justice Rampersad also upheld the men’s complaints about the conditions they endured, partly because the Prison Service had not fully responded to their allegations.

“The evidence advanced on behalf of the defendant, confined as it is to the later medical treatment of three of the six claimants, does not engage with the conditions in Building 13, and there was no evidence before the court denying the leakage of sewerage, the overcrowding, the failure of the ventilation, the constant lighting, or the absence of potable water,” he said.

Justice Rampersad found that the conditions amounted to cruel and unusual treatment, in breach of the men’s constitutional rights.

“They went well beyond the harshness that is the inevitable incident of lawful incarceration,” he said.

“To require humans to sleep on a floor across which human sewerage has leaked, in an overcrowded and unventilated space, deprived of clean drinking water and of rest, and surrounded by the presence of their own and others’ waste, is to subject them to conditions that disregard the inherent dignity of the person,” he added.

Justice Rampersad set compensation at $250 a day for the time each man was held in Building 13. He ordered additional compensation for Charles, Johnson and Dias, who successfully claimed that they had been assaulted by prison officers before being transferred.

He also awarded each man $150,000 in vindicatory damages for the breach of his constitutional rights.

“The sum is not scaled to the period each claimant spent in Building 13, because the vindicatory element does not respond to the duration of an individual’s suffering; it responds to the value of the right and to the conduct of the State, which is the same in the case of each of these six men,” Justice Rampersad said.

The additional award was partly based on the State’s position in responding to the lawsuit.

“That discloses an institutional posture in which the State does not regard itself as obliged to account to this court for the manner in which it holds men whom it has convicted of nothing,” he said.

The State was also ordered to pay the men’s legal costs.

The men were also represented by Joshua Hamlet and Nichole De Verteuil-Milne. The Prisons Commissioner and the Office of the Attorney General were represented by Monica Smith and Savi Ramhit.