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"Abu Bakr no Jesus Christ"
Abu Bakr conspiracy to murder trial - Senior Counsel Pamela Elders closing statements

Published in TNT Mirror - ignored by Express, Guardian, Newsday
24 March 2005 • 464 words

We would like to congratulate Senior Counsel Pamela Elder on a job well done.

Ms. Elder’s closing statements on the Abu Bakr conspiracy to murder trial is a fine example of how a talented lawyer can exploit the religious beliefs of the general public in order to influence a jury. In the case of SC Elder, her goal was to prevent her client, Yasin Abu Bakr, from going to jail, and for now she has succeeded.

The front page of the Trinidad Express of March 9th read “Don’t Crucify Him”, this being Elder’s appeal to the jurors. According to the newspaper report from court that day, “Tears filled the eyes of at least two jurors” as Elder used religious rhetoric to sway the jury.

She began by likening Abu Bakr to Jesus Christ, mentioning the fact that she herself is a Roman Catholic, quoting repeatedly from the Bible, describing her role as Bakr’s lawyer as being a “cross” which she has had to bear for the past two years. She also told the jury that being a juror on this case was a “cross” that they also had to bear.

Apparently Elder’s appeal to the jurors’ emotions, rather than to their rationality, worked like a charm. While emotion can never be separated from the decision-making process, it reflects poorly on the civic conscience of our society that a lawyer could present this kind of argument, precisely because it was likely to be effective.

Justice Mark Mohammed may also have done the jurors a disservice in instructing them to ignore Bakr’s history as an insurgent. Legally, a jury must ignore the criminal record of an accused. Bakr, however, was never convicted of the 1990 coup attempt. But that matter testifies to his character, which is a factor a jury does have to consider when reaching a decision. In our view, the jury ought to have been allowed to consider Bakr’s history, along with all the other character evidence presented by the prosecution. With the jury having failed to reach a verdict as required by law, Bakr’s case will now be retried.

We do not know if Justice Mohammed’s ban on character evidence or Ms. Elder’s closing argument helped to create this very unsatisfactory outcome in a high-profile trial which has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. But we are surprised that the Christian community in Trinidad and Tobago has not objected to Ms. Elder comparing Jesus to Bakr, the man responsible for an attempted coup that resulted in over 20 deaths, dozens of injuries, and millions of dollars in damage. It seems that, in our country, such facts play second fiddle to religious sentiment, metaphors and Biblical arguments - even in a court of law and in the season of Lent.