My heart bled to­day for Steven John­son, old­er broth­er of Ja­son John­son, who was the vic­tim in the Brad Boyce case. Fol­low­ing on the heels of Her­bert Vol­ney's be­lat­ed ad­mis­sion that he erred in the case, the Trinidad Guardian in­ter­viewed Steven to as­cer­tain his feel­ings in the wake of Vol­ney's epiphany. Too sad for words was Steven's lament that his par­ents (who both died with­in days of each oth­er last year) are no longer around to hear the for­mer judge's words.

But my sad­ness soon fad­ed in­to anger at the cav­a­lier and non-re­pen­tant Vol­ney who is­sued the apol­o­gy in the same way that he might or­der a gin and ton­ic from a wait­er in a restau­rant.

Doesn't this for­mer judge have any ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the se­ri­ous and crit­i­cal role of a high court judge in the ad­min­is­tra­tion of jus­tice? How is it that it took decades for Vol­ney to ad­mit that he made a mis­take? I refuse to be­lieve that in the wake of the up­roar and fury from nu­mer­ous pub­lic and pri­vate quar­ters in the wake of his ac­tions in that case that he has on­ly now re­alised that he erred.

Vol­ney now calls on the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al to re­sign, when there is over­whelm­ing ev­i­dence to demon­strate that there is ab­solute­ly no foun­da­tion to Row­ley's claims that the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al was par­tic­i­pat­ed in the ex­change of e-mails read out in Par­lia­ment on Mon­day.

Why didn't Vol­ney re­sign when sev­er­al le­gal lu­mi­nar­ies and in­deed sev­er­al quar­ters of the pub­lic ex­pressed the view that the ends of jus­tice had been de­feat­ed at his hands in the Brad Boyce case? In­deed I shud­der to think of all the oth­er cas­es which were con­duct­ed un­der his watch which may have re­sult­ed in a trav­es­ty of jus­tice.

Al­bert Hud­son,

Care­nage