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A special Senate Commission of Inquiry into
the sudden and suspicious Jul. 13 death of Investigating Judge
Jean Serge Joseph released a bomb-shell on Aug. 8: a highly
detailed 29-page
report
which charges President Michel Martelly, as
well as his Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and Justice Minister
Jean Renel Sanon, with lying to the public and calls for Haiti’s
Deputies to remove them all from office.
Judge Joseph was investigating
charges of massive corruption against Martelly’s wife, Sophia
St. Rémy Martelly, and their son, Olivier Martelly. On Jul. 2,
he had issued a summons for them along with several high
government officials to testify before him. Since then, he had
been pressured and threatened personally by Martelly and,
finally in a secret Jul. 11 meeting, by Lamothe, Sanon, and
others official as well, to call off the investigation,
according to the five senators of the Special Commission.
The Senators called on Deputies
to “recognize the interference of the Head of State, the Prime
Minister, and the Justice Minister in the sovereign exercise of
judicial power so as to obtain court decisions in their favor,”
to take note of the “perjurious nature of the executive
authorities who have denied their participation in the meeting
of Jul. 11, 2013 while the investigation confirms their
participation in that meeting,” to “recognize the betrayal of
the Head of State who had sworn to uphold the Constitution and
laws of the Republic,” and finally “to charge the Head of State
with the crime of high treason.”
The senators who authored the
report were Pierre Francky Exius, Westner Polycarpe, François
Anick Joseph, Steven Irvenson Benoit, and John Joel Joseph.
The Commission gathered
compelling testimony from many quarters including Judge Joseph’s
widow Rachel, prominent lawyer and close friend Samuel Madistin,
fellow judges Jean Wilner Morin, Bernard St. Vil, and Berge O.
Surpris, and also Ms. Ketly Julien, who works with the USAID-linked
NGO Mobile Institute for Democratic Education (IMED), which is
providing logistical support to Haiti’s judiciary.
“He told me: ‘My dear, I’m in a
real bind, a fatal situation,’” Ketly testified to the Senators
about a conversation she had with Judge Joseph on the eve of his
death concerning the secret Jul. 11 meeting which was held at the law
office of Martelly’s legal counselor Garry Lissade. “He told me:
‘It wasn’t just Garry Lissade who was at the meeting with the
Justice Minister. President Michel Martelly was there too, along
with Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe.’... He told me that as
Michel Martelly spoke to him, [Martelly] purposefully let the
spit from his mouth spray on [the judge’s] face, then [Martelly]
put his finger in [the judge’s] face as he threatened him, using
all kinds of words to humiliate him.” The judge told her that
Martelly “was very evil and used many bad words,” Ketly
testified.
The report devotes considerable
time to dissecting the contradictory testimony of Judge Raymond
Jean Michel, the dean of the Port-au-Prince court, who allegedly
drove Judge Joseph to the fateful Jul. 11 meeting. Dean Michel
claims that the two men left a practically deserted courthouse
(a hurricane was approaching Haiti) and went, not to Lissade’s
office, but to a Port-au-Prince restaurant where they sat in the
Dean’s car in the parking lot for 20 minutes. Once there, the
Judge asked the Dean one question: "Have you received calls from
people in the executive branch about the decision that I made?"
The Dean said he responded “no.”
Not only was the Dean’s
testimony contradicted by all the other people interviewed, but,
as the Commission concluded, “the story of Dean faces serious
problems in its logical consistency.”
For example, the Senators
asked: “Why, if the Dean has at his disposal an office that is
supposedly protected from the intrusion of non-invited people,
would he feel the need to go... to the parking lot of a
restaurant to answer a simple question of a judge?” and “Why
would this simple conversation have lasted 20 minutes while the
monosyllabic answer the judge received takes only a second?” and
“Why not stay in the vehicle and talk that day at the Palace of
Justice when the courthouse was virtually empty, so there was no
risk of being heard?” and finally, “What was it in that
conversation that had to be kept from being heard by intruders?”
“None of this [affair] could
have happened without the approval, support, and involvement of
the Dean,” the report notes, calling for his dismissal. “That's
why Dean Jean Michel has become the central figure in the case.”
Witness after witness told of
the high state of panic that gripped the judge in his final days
before dying of a brain hemorrhage at the capital’s Bernard Mevs
Hospital. The body was transported to Montreal, Canada, where
Judge Joseph had been a citizen and had lived for many years. A
preliminary autopsy done there has not been made public by the
Canadian coroner or by the family, and a definitive verdict on
the cause of death may come as late as November. Senator Moïse
Jean-Charles and Joseph’s brothers have charged that the judge
was poisoned with a spiked glass of whiskey that he was all but
forced to drink at the Jul. 11 meeting, but the report said that
the important matter was the meeting itself.
“Having not examined the thesis
of poisoning which, even if proven, would be difficult to
pinpoint in space and time, the Commission has become convinced
that the threats and pressures made against this honest but
fragile judge were what did him in,” the report concluded. “The
intra-parenchymal hemorrhage diagnosed [as the cause of death]
is very likely to have resulted from the intense psychological
pressure he was under.”
This pressure was building for
days before the Jul. 11 meeting, and the doomed judge told
almost anybody who would listen about the ordeal he was
enduring. “For example, one witness said that Monday, Jul. 8,
2013, returning to Port-au-Prince, the judge was stopped on
Highway #1, near Arcahaie, by a white, all-terrain pick-up,” the
report says. “The driver lowered his right window to address the
judge who lowered his left window: ‘You are keeping me from
sleeping, right?’ A conversation ensued in which serious threats
were made against the judge. It turns out the driver was
identified as President Martelly himself. He was driving and had
two police officers in USGPN [Palace Guard] uniforms in the
back. One of them took pictures of the three occupants of the
judges’ vehicle. After a litany of insults and threats,
[Martelly’s] vehicle headed back South, but the flabbergasted
judge thought only of his death. He told his security guard
Johnny and his cousin Berlens that they were about to die.”
The next step in implementing
the report’s recommendations is to have the Senate ratify the
report. This requires a quorum of 16 Senators out of the 20
seated. (Elections for the Senate’s expired third – 10 seats –
has been delayed, critics say purposefully, by the Martelly
government’s foot-dragging. The whole Parliament will expire in
January 2014 if new elections are not held.)
The House of Deputies is also
heavily bribed by the Martelly clique, with envelopes of cash
openly distributed during key votes. This will make impeachment
challenging.
Nonetheless, the report of the Senate’s Special
Commission of Inquiry is a milestone and an important official
document which painstakingly and clearly lays out an
incontrovertible case of corruption, intimidation, and intrigue
which ended in Judge Joseph’s tragic demise. |
