THE State will have to pay out millions of dollars in compensation to two groups of prisoners who were brutally assaulted by prison and police officers during a violent riot at the Golden Grove Prison in Arouca in 2006.
On April 17, the Privy Council ruled in favour of the inmates who had initially won their lawsuits against the State for the beatings they endured during the prison uprising.
In 2012, Justice Judith Jones held the attack on the 57 prisoners was unjustified and unreasonable.
However, their wins were overturned by the Court of Appeal in February 2023, in a split decision, with two out of three judges – Justices of Appeal Nolan Bereaux and Peter Rajkumar – ruling that the cases should not have been part of a test-case arrangement. Rajkumar wrote the majority decision while Justice of Appeal Vasheist Kokaram dissented.
“The court should have placed weight on what the parties had agreed and should have been slow to depart from the binding test case agreement,” Lady Ingrid Simler, who delivered the decision, held.
She said Rajkumar’s judgment was a new assessment of the justifiability of the test case agreement which was an “error of principle.”
“Moreover, it ignored the wider public interest and the fundamental importance of the principle of finality.”
She added, “This was a ‘win one win all’ agreement that was either valid as a whole or not. It was not open to the Court of Appeal to rewrite it in favour of one side.”
The riot occurred at the Remand Yard prison facility at Golden Grove, Arouca on November 11, 2006. Some of the prisoners were beaten with batons and others exposed to tear gas and shot with rubber bullets.
The claims of three, Gabriel Joseph, Antonio Sobers and Clint Wilson, were used as test cases, representing three different categories of prisoners.
Sobers’s lawsuit represented prisoners who were injured and were treated in hospital. Joseph’s represented injured prisoners treated at the prison infirmary, and Wilson’s represented prisoners who were allegedly injured but had no medical records documenting them.
Wilson was not awarded any relief, while the assessment for damages for the group of prisoners represented in Sobers and Joseph’s lawsuits was referred to a master, who had already assessed two of them in the sum of approximately $200,000 each, the State appealed and Wilson filed a cross appeal.
In 2021, the Appeal Court judges had dismissed the State’s appeal of Jones’s findings for Joseph and Sobers. Wilson’s appeal was also dismissed. However, the judges questioned the agreement to divide the claims by the group into three categories. It had also been agreed that the cases in each category would be bound by the court’s findings in the action representing their category.
The judges invited submissions on the issue and, in the majority ruling in 2023, decided the test-case agreement had to be set aside, since none of the other prisoners in the groups had established liability against the State.
However, Lady Simler held, “In this case it would have bee
