Case dismissed: legal road to nowhere

In a land full of lawyers, the following might make sense. It also may make sense to the Mad Hatter, a character in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” But it certainly doesn’t make sense to us.

We refer, of course, to the lawsuit filed by four West Bay women that was dismissed, correctly in our view, last week by Grand Court Justice Alex Henderson.

Astonishingly, this civil action against the government was financed in part by the government in the form of legal aid. In other words, government was funding both sides of the case – its own and its opposition.

We would have assumed, perhaps wrongly, that scarce legal aid dollars would be reserved for indigent criminal defendants, not civil litigants. Either way, what was the basis for government funding this case against itself?

These four plaintiffs — Alice Mae Coe, Annie Multon, Ezmie Smith and Betty Ebanks — couched their position in human rights and constitutional terms, but we all know that their real complaint is they thought they and others should have the right to drive on a stretch of road and enjoy a view they had become accustomed to.

However, as Justice Henderson observed in his ruling, “None of the plaintiffs is alleged to be the owner of an interest in land adjacent to the Affected Road or even near to it.”
Most importantly, the women missed the deadline to file their lawsuit, and this formed the basis for the court’s decision. As Justice Henderson opined: “The plaintiffs have not asked for any extension of time under section 26(4) of the Constitution. I am satisfied that this is for good reason: any such request would fail. The plaintiffs have always been well informed about the proposed road closure and can be taken to have possessed all the information necessary to advance the present claim a few days after December 15, 2011 at the latest. There is nothing before me which justifies or even explains the 14-month delay before this action was started.”

We share Justice Henderson’s dismay. It’s not that the plaintiffs were taken by surprise by the December 2011 signing of the National Roads Authority agreement between Dart Realty (Cayman) Ltd. and government. In fact, for months they had been out gathering approximately 4,000 signatures on a petition to oppose the closure of the road.

An examination by the Caymanian Compass revealed that a number of the signatories on the petition were duplicate entries, some people signed on behalf of their whole family, some people signed on behalf of others not in their family, some entries had only first names, some entries had only a first initial and a last name, some entries were illegible, some were children (as young as age 11), some were cruise ship visitors, and some entries were simply printed names with no signature. In addition, there appeared to be cases where one person had signed a whole page of names.

All in all, it was perhaps a well-meaning but amateurish, even embarrassing, exercise.
Had Justice Henderson ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, we are still perplexed at what his remedy at law might have been (rip up the road?). In the end, of course, he based his decision not on constitutional grounds but on temporal grounds: The plaintiffs missed the deadline.

It’s one thing to embrace the quaint aphorism describing Cayman as “The islands time forgot.”

It’s quite another to engage in a lengthy, expensive civil lawsuit, filed by “four plaintiffs who had forgot time.”