Some time ago, I read in the Nation newspaper that Attorney-at-law, Hal Gollop, had objected to the Chief Magistrate, Mr. Clyde Nicholls presiding over a case after he (Nicholls) went on pre-retirement leave and another person had been appointed to act in his post. As I understand it, Mr. Gollop argued that since someone had already been appointed to act in the post, Mr. Nicholls would be precluded from performing the functions of that office. In essence, Gollop was saying that two persons could not function as chief magistrate at the same time
I am not one to just accept anything, so I decided to research the point for myself, and came up with section 114 (2) of the Constitution which states:
‘Where by this Constitution a power is conferred upon any person or authority to make any appointment to any public office, a person may be appointed to that office notwithstanding that some other person may be holding that office when that other person is on leave of absence pending relinquishment of the office; and where two or more persons are holding the same office by reason of an appointment made in pursuance of this subsection, then for the purposes of any function conferred upon the holder of that office the person last appointed shall be deemed to be the sole holder of the office.’
I must concede that Mr. Gollop had a point. However, to my mind, his point would have created problems for the administration of justice, and I was really looking forward to see how the problems would be rectified. I did not have to wait for very long to see what Government did to hopefully resolve the issues. The answer came in the Official Gazette dated June 9, 2011: notice number 863 had a number of interesting items that have some relevance.
Firstly, Ms. Manila Renee, principal crown council, was appointed to act as magistrate with effect from May 1, 2011 until further notice but not later than July 31, 2011. Secondly, later in the same notice, the public was informed that the acting appointments of both Magistrate Deborah Holder, as chief magistrate, and Ms Manila Renee, as magistrate, had been revoked for the period May 18, 2011 to June 12 2011. Presumably, that would have solved the problem of having two chief magistrates and one too many magistrates
I do not know and am therefore left to wonder what would have been the effect if Ms. Manila Renee had heard any cases during that period and worse yet, suppose she had sentence anyone to prison during the period when she was not a magistrate. This scenario boggles the mind.
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