PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Oct 5, CMC – A High Court judge has ordered the state to pay more than TT$1.8 million (One TT dollar=US$-.37 cents) in compensation to six men who were removed from remand yard to a dilapidated and overcrowded building at the Maximum Security Prison in Arouca.
High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad upheld the motion filed by the men – Stefon Austin, Ayokie Charles, Kerry Valentino, Brent Johnson, Joshua Janet and Darrel Dias – challenging the decision to transfer them on July 24, 2021.
Austin died in custody while the case was pending. His mother was substituted as a claimant and will receive his compensation.
The men had claimed that were subjected to inhumane conditions, including being denied medical care. They were relocated on different dates between December 2022 and April 2023. Through their attorneys, Justice Rampersad was asked to decide whether the transfer was an irregular and improper exercise of the then-Prisons Commissioner’s discretion under the Prison Act to move prisoners between facilities.
The judge noted that the then-Prisons Commissioner had refused to disclose his reasons for transferring the men, citing national security concerns. He said that a blanket assertion that the commissioner had acted properly did not help the court decide the issue.
“The court is therefore left without any evidential foundation upon which it could conclude that the considerations advanced by the claimants were weighed, or that the decision struck a balance that was rationally open to the Prisons Commissioner,” he said.
The judge upheld the men’s complaints about the conditions they endured, partly because the Prison Service had not fully responded to their allegations.
“The evidence advanced on behalf of the defendant, confined as it is to the later medical treatment of three of the six claimants, does not engage with the conditions in Building 13, and there was no evidence before the court denying the leakage of sewerage, the overcrowding, the failure of the ventilation, the constant lighting, or the absence of potable water,” he said.
The judge found that the conditions amounted to cruel and unusual treatment, in breach of the men’s constitutional rights.
“They went well beyond the harshness that is the inevitable incident of lawful incarceration,” he said.
“To require humans to sleep on a floor across which human sewerage has leaked, in an overcrowded and unventilated space, deprived of clean drinking water and of rest, and surrounded by the presence of their own and others’ waste, is to subject them to conditions that disregard the inherent dignity of the person,” he added.
Justice Rampersad set compensation at TT$250 a day for the time each man was held in Building 13 at the Maximum Security Prison. He ordered additional compensation for Charles, Johnson and Dias, who successfully claimed that they had been assaulted by prison officers before being transferred.
He also awarded each man TT$150,000 in vindicatory damages for the breach of his constitutional rights.
“The sum is not scaled to the period each claimant spent in Building 13, because the vindicatory element does not respond to the duration of an individual’s suffering; it responds to the value of the right and to the conduct of the State, which is the same in the case of each of these six men,” Justice Rampersad said.
The State was also ordered to pay the men’s legal costs.
CMC/aj/ir/2026