Regional police prosecutors sharpen skills

Regional police prosecutors will be sharpening their court room skills this weekend. The Drug Control Legal Training Program, to be held June twelfth to the fifteenth at the Fiesta Inn, will have the participation of forty-one prosecutors from Jamaica, Barbados, Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Cayman and Belize. The program, which is funded by the United States and European Union, will include presentations from seven regional experts. According to coordinator Faith Marshall-Harris, the main focus is on drug cases.

Faith Marshall-Harris, Project Coordinator

“One of the concerns with doing drug cases in the Caribbean is that the majority of them, eighty to ninety percent of them, are tried in the Magistrate’s Courts. And in most of them, Caribbean persons prosecuting in the Magistrate’s Courts are political prosecutors who are experienced but not legally trained. They come up against some really talented experienced defense councils who are legally trained, and of course as people involved in the drug trade get more affluent they will be able to afford the best defense council. So we are trying to equip the police prosecutors to be able to withstand that sort of competition because they will have to meet the case of the defense council. And so we are trying to sharpen their skills in the courtroom in order for them to deal with the sort of defense they will come up against. We are trying to win the war so to speak.”

The program, which is the first of five to be held throughout the region, will be opened at nine o’clock Friday morning.