Griffith ordered to pay close to $1m to ex-judge

JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

For­mer po­lice com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith says he will ap­peal a court rul­ing that or­dered he pay re­tired Ap­peal Court judge Stan­ley John near­ly one mil­lion dol­lars, in­clu­sive of le­gal costs.

In a What­sApp re­sponse fol­low­ing an oral judg­ment in the mat­ter yes­ter­day, Grif­fith said if it needs to reach the Privy Coun­cil, he was will­ing to take it there.

“I was ac­cused of run­ning a well-oiled crim­i­nal en­ter­prise. I was ac­cused of this be­ing done un­der my nose, mean­ing that I al­lowed it to hap­pen. I was ac­cused of break­ing the law. I did not have the op­por­tu­ni­ty for nat­ur­al jus­tice to de­fend my name against what was said in the re­port,” Grif­fith said.

“And it was stat­ed to the me­dia that he stands by what he said. And five years lat­er, all this was said with­out not one shred of ev­i­dence, no wit­ness, no re­port, no da­ta, no file, no video, no state­ment from any­one to jus­ti­fy the false state­ments against me. I will take this to the Privy Coun­cil if re­quired.”

High Court Judge Devin­dra Ram­per­sad yes­ter­day or­dered that Grif­fith pay $750,000 in dam­ages, $90,250 in pre­scribed costs on the claim and $61,500 on the counter-claim.

Af­ter John, through at­tor­neys Marc Camp­bell and Chelsea John, sued Grif­fith in Ju­ly 2023, Grif­fith counter-sued, which was dis­missed by Ram­per­sad.

The law­suit came af­ter Grif­fith made a six-minute and 52-sec­ond-long video which was shared on so­cial me­dia mak­ing the 14 defam­a­to­ry com­ments. The video gath­ered over 40,000 views on Face­book, with over 500 shares and over 300 com­ments, and was shared on What­sApp as well.

John was hired by the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion to in­ves­ti­gate the is­su­ing of firearm users’ li­cens­es (FULs) by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) in 2021. At the com­ple­tion of that in­ves­ti­ga­tion, he sub­mit­ted a re­port in De­cem­ber that year which de­scribed the is­suance FULs by the TTPS as “a thriv­ing well-oiled white-col­lar crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.”

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia the fol­low­ing year, John said he wrote in his re­port that “(Grif­fith’s) own ex­pla­na­tion of his in­volve­ment in the process, in my opin­ion…was in breach of the law as set out in Sec­tion 16 of the Firearms Act.”

Asked then if he had con­tact­ed Grif­fith about the al­le­ga­tion of law­break­ing and what re­sponse Grif­fith gave, Jus­tice John re­spond­ed, “It was not nec­es­sary to con­tact him.”

John’s probe was one of three in­to the han­dling of FULs, but none of them led to Grif­fith be­ing ques­tioned in re­la­tion to the mat­ter.

Ram­per­sad is ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er his writ­ten judg­ment next week de­tail­ing his rea­sons for his find­ings.

Grif­fith was rep­re­sent­ed by Lar­ry Lal­la SC and Nicholas Per­sad.