The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

If Joan Sawyer was just an ordinary retired senior citizen she would be well within her remit to wax eloquent on any subject her heart desires.

But she is, actually, Madam Justice Dame Joan, retired former Chief Justice and former President of the Court of Appeal. You just can’t get more blue legal blood coursing through your veins than that.

She has a well-deserved state pension and all the benefits of privilege befitting the high offices she once held. But she has a political bee in her bonnet and it stings whenever she mounts her high horse.

The Judge is known for favouring talk shows. And it is here that she has at times been the proverbial bull in a china shop because of her belligerence and apparent abandonment of judicial temperament.

As a general rule the canons of judicial conduct inside and beyond the courtroom apply to both sitting and retired judges.

When she headed the third branch of government Dame Joan largely stayed in the legal lane and left politicking to the politicians. But with her wig and scarlet robes long decommissioned, she apparently feels she can flip a switch and erase her time as head of the judiciary. There is a code of conduct for sitting judges that has, till now, been largely observed by retirees from the bench. In 1955 England, the Lord High Chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, at the time the highest-ranking judicial officer in Britain set out what became “the Kilmuir Rules” to guide sitting and presumably retired judges.

The basic tenet of the rules was that so long as a judge keeps silent his reputation for wisdom and impartiality remains unassailable. He went even further saying it would be inappropriate for a judge to be associated with talks or anything which could fairly be interpreted as entertainment.

Dame Joan went on a talk show and ripped apart the actions of the government and the Prime Minister in placing us under lockdown again, or as she called it, house arrest.

She heaped scorn on the PM accusing him of acting outside the powers of the Constitution, although it is likely that in a real court of law she might not have carried so flagrant a brief.

She conveniently forgot that, in a real court, subject matter experts (like public health officials) would be called to explain to the court that a pandemic was a real emergency with life-and-death consequences for the same people whom the Constitution was drafted to protect.

She conceded that emergency powers were legal, but when the government actually exercised that power to protect citizens she equated that action to martial law. But she was too clever by half.

Dame Joan must realize that she must seek a balance between the right to speak her mind and her duty to do so in a manner to preserve the dignity of the high office she once held. It is incumbent upon her to always uphold the impartiality and independence of our judiciary, sitting or retired.

Trash talking her way through tough legal matters in the height of the surge in Covid-19 cases may be good for the ratings of the radio station that invited her to speak, but it is counter-productive and a slight to the fine women and men who serve as judges and to all officers of the court.

Madam Justice, you are out of order.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

August 9, 2020.