Hitmen arriving on boats from Jamaica, armed with high-powered rifles, intent on breaking out two dangerous gang leaders from the high-security wing of Cayman’s Northward Prison.
It’s a plot that could have been torn from the pages of a crime thriller.
But the details don’t come from the mind of John Grisham or even Cayman’s own, now-deceased, inmate-turned-novelist Sheldon Brown.
They are from an affidavit made by Governor Martyn Roper to support the continued exile of two convicted murderers, transferred from Cayman to the UK under obscure 19th century British legislation.
The governor, in a series of five such testimonies, makes the case that brothers Osbourne Douglas and Justin Ramoon pose such a threat to national security that they cannot safely be held on the island.
Roper’s affidavits, along with testimony from the brothers and a series of connected officials – whose identities have been withheld apparently for their own safety – have been made public for the first time after the Compass successfully applied to the Court of Appeal to obtain hundreds of pages of documents in a long and complex case.
In a significant judgment, the court granted access to the bulk of the evidence viewed by the justices, who handed down the latest decision in the ongoing case on 27 April.
It is the first time, as far as we are aware, that a Cayman court has granted this kind of access following an application from a media house.
A glimmer of light
The cache of files – details of which we are reporting in a Compass investigative series – casts a glimmer of light on one of the most opaque cases in recent memory.
It enables us, for the first time, to report fully on the human rights appeal made by the two men to allow them, despite their crimes, to maintain personal contact with their children. A series of affidavits, from high-ranking police, prison and national security officials, meanwhile, spell out the gravity of the concern about the brothers, who are alleged to be senior members of the Central Military Killers gang.
The documents also include previously unseen testimony from a senior prison official who states categorically that HMP Northward is not equipped to house high-risk ‘category A’ inmates like Ramoon and Douglas.
Using separate data, released under the Freedom of Information Act, we can also outline
the financial cost to the Cayman government of sending prisoners – including, but not limited to, Douglas and Ramoon – to serve their sentences in the UK.
Secret files
The Compass will also highlight the extent to which evidence in this case has been kept
secret. The claims, denied by the brothers, that they were dangerous gang leaders
orchestrating criminal activity from prison and potentially planning an armed escape, weren’t subjected to full legal scrutiny and aren’t supported by much meaningful evidence in the court files.
There are legitimate reasons for that.
A judge concluded during preliminary hearings that concerns for the safety of informants and officials was sufficiently grave that all government witnesses, with the exception of the governor, should be granted anonymity.
Crucially, the judge also ruled that much of the supporting evidence should be withheld completely and protected from the normal rules of disclosure by a Public Interest Immunity certificate.
The challenge for the courts has been how to determine if then-Governor Helen Kilpatrick’s decision was fair and proportionate without access to those files.
In a fresh twist last week, the Court of Appeal, reversing an earlier decision from the Grand Court, ruled that a special behind closed-doors hearing – known as a Closed Material Procedure and typically used in counter-terrorism cases in the UK – could be held in Cayman to allow a judge to decide the case with the benefit of all the evidence that was available to the governor.
For national security reasons, the information won’t be made available to the men, their lawyers, the public or the press.
The public files, legal arguments and judgments, scrutinised by the Compass, do allow us, however, to fully report on the intriguing debate around the challenges of countering national security threats in a fair manner in the Cayman Islands.
Our series starts today and continues all week.
The Prison Papers: Low-level killers or a national security threat?
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