A criminal case arising from an opposition public meeting in Roseau on February 7, 2017, has come to an end after Director of Public Prosecutions Sherma Dalrymple discontinued the obstruction charge against United Workers’ Party political leader Dr Thomson Fontaine.
Fontaine announced the decision in a statement, reading from a notice in which the DPP said she was discontinuing the proceedings under Section 72(c) of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Dominica.
The charge concerned a truck near the Financial Centre after the opposition-organised “Day of the People” meeting on Upper Kennedy Avenue.
According to the allegation read by Fontaine, he refused repeated instructions from police officers to allow the truck, identified as TB 859, to proceed west after the meeting concluded. Prosecutors had accused him of wilfully obstructing officers in the execution of their duties.
Fontaine maintained his innocence throughout the case. He said the charge exposed him to a possible prison sentence had he been convicted, and described its discontinuance as the end of more than nine years of arrests, court appearances and travel expenses.
“I consistently maintained my innocence and felt that this case was always more about political prosecution rather than the pursuit of justice,” he said.
The UWP leader alleged that police arrested him on three occasions and that he spent three days in custody. He said officers wearing military-style attire pursued him “like a common criminal.”
For much of the period covered by the case, Fontaine said, he was working as head of strategy at the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission in Juba, South Sudan. The commission oversees the implementation of South Sudan’s peace agreement.
Fontaine said he had to travel back to Dominica repeatedly for court, sometimes only to have the matter adjourned for a short period.
He put the number of required appearances at 22 and said the short notice often made flights especially expensive.
“An average single ticket to South Sudan, given the short notice of appearance, was normally between US$5,000 to US$7,000,” he said. That is approximately EC$13,500 to EC$18,900 per ticket.
He also questioned the public cost of prosecuting the matter, claiming that three senior lawyers from Trinidad and Tobago were brought in to handle a charge he believed could have been dealt with locally. No figure for the prosecution’s legal costs was provided in his statement.
The DPP’s decision brings the obstruction proceedings to a close. Fontaine’s allegations about political motivation and the prosecution’s expense remain his account of the case; the notice of discontinuance, as he read it, did not give a reason for the decision or make a finding on those claims.
