Bar Association Confident with Case Against the Chief Justice

Andrew Marshalleck

The Chief Justice’s position on the matter is that there is a constitutional conflict for Vidal to be both the Director of Public Prosecution and the President of the Bar Association.  But according to Marshalleck, the commission’s concerns are not for constitutional interpretation, but rather for constitutional reform. He says that the Constitution makes it clear that the President of the Bar is entitled to be a member of the commission. Marshalleck argued that if the commission had concerns with Vidal, they had the option to appoint an alternate. 

Andrew Marshalleck, Attorney for Bar Association

“I can summarize them in the terms used before the judge and to say that they are really arguments for constitutional reform not constitutional interpretation. It’s an argument for what they wanted to be given what they considered to be important rather than what the language that is in the constitution actually says. On the issue of delay, there are two ways of looking at it. If you look at it from their side, looking at us, they say that we have not done anything and haven’t done it in a timely way. Fine. If we look at it from our side to them is that they are under a duty to act in accordance to the constitution and they proceeded not withstanding having resolve the issue in a fair and independent manner because asking one of their own members to give an opinion is hardly an independent approach to resolving an issue that they themselves raise. How do you expect a complaint to be raise about the qualification of the President of the Bar to sit in the commission made by the commission, they made the complaint, and they decided. Then they say, “Court don’t do anything about it even if I was wrong because they didn’t stop me.”  Does that make any sense? Why is there a need to change hats? The D.P.P. brings to those decisions a wealth of knowledge about how the criminal system works.  That can be beneficial to the decision of the commission. It is only those decisions that affect the D.P.P.’s office directly that there would have any kind of real conflict and if there was a difficulty in shifting hats as they call it you deal with it by way of recusal from the particular decision. You don’t deal with it by throwing the president out of the meeting room indefinitely into the future. You recuse yourself from participation in a particular decision in respect n which you may be conflicted and don’t know how to shift hats. But bear in mind that majority of decision before the commission there would have been no such conflict. The constitution also provides if there was a difficulty the qualifications of the president to sit for an alternate to be appointed. So ask yourself, if you had trouble with the President, with Mrs. Vidal as President being D.P.P. then why didn’t you ask for us to send somebody else? Why did you put us out the room and proceed to make all these decisions on your won without us knowing about any of them.”