Man Reaches Settlement After Being Held 29 Years

Jahnava Nitai Das · January 29, 2003

KINGSTON, Jamaica (Reuters) - Jamaica reached an out-of-court settlement with a man jailed for 29 years without trial for allegedly breaking a window, a human rights lawyer said.

Ivan Nettleford, 77, released last year from the St. Catherine District prison on the outskirts of the capital, was lost in the prison system after being charged with malicious destruction of property in 1972.

The maximum penalty for the crime is three months in prison or a $20 fine.

"The government has offered us a settlement and we are taking that," Nancy Anderson, a lawyer and spokeswoman for the Jamaica Independent Council for Human Rights, said on Monday.

She declined to disclose the amount of the settlement.

Nettleford was freed after the human rights group stepped in following a newspaper story about his plight.

Nettleford was charged with breaking a window at a bank in the central parish of Clarendon. On his first appearance in court he was declared unfit to enter a plea due to a mental condition and the judge ordered him kept in custody until his condition improved.

"His human rights were completely ignored and abused by the judicial authorities," Anderson said, adding that Nettleford had now fully recovered from his mental condition.

Upon his release last April, Nettleford complained about years of abuse in prison, saying conditions were "terrible and wicked."

theist · January 29, 2003

On the surface this situations always appear tragic. I wonder if it is not justice though. Perhaps this person 'cheated' the justice system in the past in some way.

Maybe he harmed someone and paid off the judge for a finding of innocent, or some other similar transgression.

stonehearted · January 29, 2003

theist writes: On the surface this situations always appear tragic. I wonder if it is not justice though. Perhaps this person 'cheated' the justice system in the past in some way.

Maybe he harmed someone and paid off the judge for a finding of innocent, or some other similar transgression.

stone: Krishna Himself admits in Bhagavad-gita that the workings of karma are impossible to trace out. Of course, there's ultimately no mistake, but that doesn't excuse us from responsibility for incompetence or evil motives. It's easy for us to observe from the outside that Nettleford (or whoever) is not actually completely innocent; it's a different matter, though, when you're the one locked up for 30 years with no discernable good reason. And, to keep this from sounding like a simplistic liberal whine, that's everyone's position in the material world. Who can remember the original choice to tuen our backs on our real nature. Who can remember the crime we committed in a previous life that's responsible for chronic debt, or repeated lousy marriages, etc.?

The real deal is to get the heck out by taking full advantage of the divine grace extended to us.