Audrey Matura-Shepherd
When it comes to the government in this scenario, attorney Audrey Matura-Shepherd pulled no punches. She believes that Prime Minister Dean Barrow deliberately and with great calculation did not speak the truth at his press conference last week. Barrow stated that the B.S.C.F.A. was misguided in seeking an order of Mandamus, which he said would fall flat on its face. The PM also chastised those seeking to take legal action against the Court, stating that they couldn’t since a previous court order had declared the Act unconstitutional. Well, the application for a Mandamus hearing did not fall flat on its face, and today Matura-Shepherd lashed out at the Prime Minister and his Attorney-General, stating that as a junior attorney she feels mortified to have to be schooling them on basic points of law.
Audrey Matura-Shepherd, Attorney
“That exonerates our position and clearly indicates that what the Prime Minister said was an outright lie, but a lie strategically placed before the hearing and strategically placed live on earshot of the farmers who clearly did not know better, do not understand. And you have to understand, when the leader of the country talks you have to give him credibility. The Prime Minister with all due respect is an intelligent man, he is a Senior Counsel. He is a trained attorney. He has far more years than I do before the Bar. So when he speaks people think a person with authority is speaking. And no matter what office you hold, as long as you remain an attorney you are an officer of the court and you must tell the truth, at least on what the law is, and that did not happen and so I will call that out. To make matters worse, the Attorney-General, Honourable Sedi Elrington who is the titular head of the Bar and of the Judiciary now decided that he will make his proclamation yesterday and said that this case will go nowhere, that we were not entitled to bring it and we brought it the wrong way..I mean, it’s rather embarrassing for me as a very junior attorney to have to be correcting my senior attorneys on very basic principles of law and procedure, trite law as we call it, in our profession.”
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