Another delay
Long-promised national autopsy suite needs $85m more for completion
THE national Forensic Patholgy Autopsy Suite, which has already seen three extensions since the promised March 2023 completion date, will require additional spend of $85 million before being ready.
The amount is contained in the 2025/2026 Estimates of Expenditure tabled in the House of Representatives last Thursday and will come from the just over $53 billion allocated to the Ministry of National Security under its capital budget.
The project, which falls under the ministry’s Internal Security and Regulation Programme, is expected to increase the forensic capacity of Jamaica Constabulary Force and reduce the backlog of criminal and other cases.
Acting Governor General Steadman Fuller on Thursday, in delivering the 2025/2026 Throne Speech outlining the Government’s priorities for the new budget year, listed the construction project as among those the Administration remains committed to in the thrust to reduce major crimes, improve public order, and enhance public safety.
“Integrating legislation, technology, infrastructure, and social investment is creating a safer Jamaica. The JamaicaEye CCTV network is expanding, and the C5 Security Business Solution contract is advancing data-driven policing. Renovations at 17 police stations, ongoing construction of divisional headquarters, and the near completion of the Forensic Pathology Autopsy Suite are enhancing law enforcement capacity,” the acting governor general said.
Construction of the suite, which is expected to bolster the work of Institute for Forensic Science and Legal Medicine, had been announced in 2021 with an original duration of April 2021 to March 2023. That completion date however changed to December 2024 and is now set for June this year. The initial $618 million estimated cost for the state-of-the-art facility has now been revised to an estimated $971,074 million.
The $85-million spend for this fiscal year has been split between $35 million for “goods and services” and $50 million for the purchase of “fixed assets”.
The absence of an autopsy suite has caused major angst over the years, chief among them the expense of outsourcing the services to privately operated funeral homes which, between 2017 and 2021, cost the Government $482 million for the storage of bodies.
The island has been without a national morgue since the 1970s. The Edward Seaga-led Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government was advanced in planning the construction of an autopsy suite when it lost the 1989 General Election. Calls for the construction of a modern facility gained renewed fervour following the 2007 shock death of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer while the island hosted the International Cricket Council World Cup, sparking an investigation that unveiled inadequacies on several levels.
That year, then national security minister under the People’s National Party Government Dr Peter Phillips said the Woolmer investigation, “brought into focus the need for the most up to date forensic capabilities possible, including, most importantly, the construction of a new public morgue”.
The PNP Government, however, lost the September 2007 General Election to the JLP, and with it the plan to allocate $80 million for the construction of a state-of-the-art morgue died.
In 2008 nearly $1 billion worth of national security contracts, including almost $500 million to complete the long-awaited public facility, were approved by National Contracts Commission (NCC).
The Office of the Contractor General, in a news release issued at the time, said $425.6 million had been approved for the construction of the facility at 149 Orange Street, downtown Kingston. That contract was awarded to Tank-Weld Metals, and expectations were that the building would be completed by the end of 2009.
Fast-forward to 2018 and then National Security Minister Robert Montague announced that the ministry was moving quickly on plans for the construction of an autopsy suite in Kingston.
At that time Montague said the ministry already had the lands for the facility and was hoping to have the approval processes completed with Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation and other agencies soon.
“We…want to move very quickly on that so that we can use that as a basis to begin to build out a public morgue,” Montague said then.
In 2021 the Andrew Holness-led Administration said it had anticipated that 40 per cent of construction activities would be completed for the fiscal year 2021/22. It said the project, which is being financed from the Consolidated Fund, was slated to commence April 2021 and was projected to end in March 2023.
In July last year Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang told the Jamaica Observer that the facility, located at 149 Orange Street in downtown Kingston, “is practically finished”.
“It’s almost done, it’s just the equipment we are putting in now; the building itself is practically finished. We are installing the freezers and the other equipment as we speak,” Chang said.
