The move of Commissioner of Police Anil Kumar Dip to challenge the decision of Magistrate Jade Ngan Chai King in court is an excellent idea. It will put an end to the evil debate he started by challenging the magistrate’s ruling and the Director of Public Prosecutions’ well thought-through decision to align himself with her and not seek to keep Bruneau Laurette in jail for more time than he has spent in already. By calling on the Supreme Court to make the call of whether Laurette stays out on bail or is remanded until the trial, Police Commissioner Dip is acting within the law and we can therefore only commend and congratulate him for that. 

It’s a dreadful pity he did not do that immediately after the magistrate’s decision instead of spending his time on an unnecessary polemic and embarking on a mudslinging campaign.

Now, the police commissioner first has to convince the Supreme Court that he had a strong reason not to appeal within the statutory delay prescribed by the law. The last day for lodging the application was February 27th. The commissioner lodged the application on March 7th.  The reason given is “torrential rains and the ensuing flooding in Port Louis”. The court will naturally have to decide whether rain and the ensuing flooding are compelling grounds for delay to allow the commissioner’s appeal to proceed.

If they are, the commissioner must allow for the possibility that, considering the soundness of Magistrate Jade Ngan Chai King’s judgment, the Supreme Court might not reverse it and the police commissioner would have egg on his face. I mean if he knew from the start that he was going to appeal the magistrate’s and DPP’s ruling, shouldn’t he have kept quiet and done what he is allowed to do under the law without compromising his position? Now that he has officially and openly criticised the judiciary and the Office of the DPP, how would he feel if he received a slap from the court either by not accepting to grant him the delay or by hearing the case and not going along the lines he has publicised? 

Instead of the “torrential rains and ensuing flooding in Port Louis”, the police commissioner could perhaps have used “heavy workload” and showed us some progress in the Bruneau Laurette case itself. Some unedited camera footage of the day of the arrest or the days prior to that. Some contacts of a big mafia network that Laurette is part of and which they happened upon while looking at his private messages on his electronic devices and deciding which WhatsApp groups he should leave and which ones he should remain part of. Or maybe show us their efforts in convincing the Forensic Science Laboratory to analyse and evaluate the drugs allegedly seized at his place without further delay.

Even better, the commissioner could have stated that he and his police officers have been busy working hard on a case that Magistrate Vidya Mungroo-Jugurnath chastised them for sitting on and showing an “unprecedented” degree of incompetence in dealing with. They could justify the importance of working on this case by saying it is not only a case of drugs but one of alleged murderer so the alleged murderers must be even more dangerous if they are loose out there. Or maybe they thought it apt to just give Soopramanien Kistnen’s widow some justice after being swindled of a salary that a pious frequently praying former minister bloated with money was adding to his income. 

I don’t know if the Supreme Court would have accepted that excuse more readily than rain, but I would. All the police had to do was show that they are working to protect the population, instead of servilely serving their political masters. 

Having said that, I quite like the rain justification. I often used it when I was at school. At that time, you could use ‘rain’ and ‘school’ in the same sentence. One did not cancel the other.