Barbados Bar Association Calls for Inquiry into Police Station Cell Phone Scandal

The scandal involving the discovery of a cell phone taped under a table in a police station interviewing room while a lawyer conferred with her client escalated on Wednesday with the Barbados Bar Association (BBA) calling for a commission of inquiry into the incident.

Convenor of the association’s Criminal Law Council, Martie Garnes, said the BBA is keeping all its legal options open at this point on how to proceed in the event they did not get to see a copy of the full report from a previous Regional Security System (RSS) investigation into the matter

and a commission of inquiry was not started.

“Even if it is that they don’t want to go so far as to do a commission of inquiry, let’s have an independent body deal with that investigation,” he said at a press conference. “Who is policing the police?”

Garnes also insisted that the authorities need to make changes to interviewing rooms in the island’s police stations to better protect client-attorney privilege.

It was on February 4 that attorney-at-law Faith Greaves discovered the phone that was taped under the table while she met with a client at the District ‘E’ station in Speightstown. Greaves recalled that she heard “a loud crashing sound in the room” and later discovered a mobile phone that had three pieces of duct tape attached to it.

In a letter to Greaves last month, Commissioner of Police Richard Boyce said that the RSS investigation had found that the phone in question was “unserviceable and there was no recording on the phone”.

On Wednesday, Greaves said that in a written response to Commissioner Boyce, “we will be requesting a copy of the said RSS report”.

According to Garnes, a public inquiry into the incident would, among other things, help to determine if from the time the cellphone was discovered it was placed into custody and not tampered with.

He said there were still too many unanswered questions, including whether that investigation included finding out who was the owner of the cell phone and if there was not recording, if a call was in progress at the time the lawyer met with her client.

“They are saying the phone is unserviceable. I find that quite odd and quite strange,” Garnes told reporters.

“In his letter, the Commissioner of Police referred to it as a ‘multipurpose’ room and that is true . . . . Sometimes you have to cease communication with a client because an officer wants to go and print something. This is not a minor breach. It is a major breach.

“We are asking at this point that a commission of inquiry be conducted in this matter because the mere fact that the presence of a phone that has three pieces of duct tape on it; that, in and of itself, has breached client-attorney privilege. It could only be two reasons that [phone] is there – either one, you are calling that phone before the attorney comes in, and [you are] listening in, or two, it is being used to record. So, if it is there is nothing on it, was it used to transmit? That is the question . . . the police now have to answer.”