Derek Achong

A po­lice of­fi­cer, who was ar­rest­ed af­ter her boyfriend was held for steal­ing from a Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion ware­house in 2015, has won her wrong­ful ar­rest and false im­pris­on­ment law­suit against the State.

De­liv­er­ing a judg­ment in WPC Tere­bett De­here’s law­suit, High Court Judge Ava­son Quin­lan-Williams or­dered $75,000 in com­pen­sa­tion as she ruled that the of­fi­cers did not have rea­son­able or prob­a­ble cause to sus­pect that she was in­volved in the theft.

“The court is sat­is­fied that none of the of­fi­cers in­volved in the claimant’s ar­rest and de­ten­tion had an hon­est be­lief or sus­pi­cion that the claimant had com­mit­ted an of­fence. There were no ob­jec­tive fac­tors, based on the ev­i­dence, for the ar­rest­ing of­fi­cers to have formed that con­clu­sion,” Quin­lan-Williams said.

Ac­cord­ing to the ev­i­dence in the case, in De­cem­ber 2015, De­here’s then boyfriend, al­so a po­lice of­fi­cer, was ar­rest­ed and charge with an­oth­er man for steal­ing a quan­ti­ty of liquor and elec­tron­ics from the di­vi­sion’s ware­house.

De­here was ar­rest­ed as she at­tend­ed his first court ap­pear­ance in the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates’ Court with his moth­er. She was de­tained for six and a half hours be­fore she was even­tu­al­ly re­leased with­out be­ing charged.

In her judg­ment, Quin­lan-Williams ruled that the of­fi­cers did not have any ev­i­dence that De­here was in­volved in the bur­glary or was stor­ing the stolen items, which would have been re­quired to le­git­i­mate­ly ar­rest her.

“The de­fen­dants have led no ev­i­dence to show that the claimant re­ceived any stolen prop­er­ty know­ing same to be stolen. In search­ing the home of the claimant it ap­pears that they were on a fish­ing ex­er­cise,” she said.

In as­sess­ing the com­pen­sa­tion for De­here, Quin­lan-Williams not­ed that she was ar­rest­ed in front of col­leagues and was tak­en to her home in hand­cuffs to wit­ness the search.

“Un­doubt­ed­ly these events would have caused the claimant to feel em­bar­rassed, hu­mil­i­at­ed and caused in­jury to her rep­u­ta­tion as she was in full view of her neigh­bours and per­sons she knew,” Quin­lan-Williams said.

She al­so ruled that $75,000 plus in­ter­est was fair, rea­son­able and suf­fi­cient com­pen­sa­tion as the of­fi­cers’ con­duct was not so out­ra­geous to jus­ti­fy an ad­di­tion award of dam­ages.

De­here was rep­re­sent­ed by Lemuel Mur­phy and Abi­gail Roach while Ste­fan Jaikaran and Sav­it­ri Ma­haraj rep­re­sent­ed the State.