Attorney calls for criminal investigations into delayed case
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, Humphrey McPherson, on Monday called for a criminal investigation into the circumstances responsible for the holding up of a negligence lawsuit he filed against the Attorney General and the Cornwall Regional Hospital in 1995.
“This is just not right nor just, from 1995 this suit was filed and my client has been suffering since then, getting nowhere. Now this morning I am being told that the matter is being set down for a case management conference on Friday,” he told the Observer.
Case management conferences are essentially private court sessions involving a judge and lawyers representing both parties to a lawsuit, agreeing on what direction to take in a case in terms of a trial date, judge and location, among other issues.
However, McPherson said Monday that, while he had no objection to the intent and principle of Friday’s session, he was very uncomfortable with the process by which the case was being assigned.
“I don’t think it is right for any one judge to assign himself to manage the case…I think it is wrong and I might just go to the court of appeal right now and stop Justice Cooke from hearing the matter on Friday,” he said.
If McPherson takes this course of action, it will lengthen the time that Carol Samuels, a poor, unemployed woman from St James and her nine year-old daughter, Sucina Willis, will have to wait for their suit to be heard.
The suit was filed in September of 1995, almost a year after Sucina was born. It claimed that as a result of the hospital staff’s negligence, Succina was born with cerebral palsy.
“Our argument is that the staff took the child through labour although the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around her neck. She suffered severe asphyxia and now has cerebral palsy,” said McPherson.
In its defence to McPherson’s claims, government attorneys said that the hospital never saw an ultrasound showing a cord wrapped around the baby’s neck.
Additionally, the lawyers are contending that they did not perform a caesarean section because there was no guarantee that the lives of mother or child would have been saved by such a procedure.
However, on Monday McPherson insisted that a grand conspiracy was afoot to prevent the case from being tried.
“That defence is foolishness. The real issue is whether or not the ultrasound revealed that there was a problem,” said the attorney.
“However, the doctor that conducted the two ultrasounds on my client is being hidden. All I want to do is cross-examine him to ask him questions about the ultrasound that could clear up the case,” he said.
A representative at the Barnett Clinic in Montego Bay, where the doctor used to work, told the Observer Monday that he was no longer on the payroll.
“He left sometime ago, we have no contact for him and there’s nothing we can help with,” she said.