An­na-Lisa Paul

As the dust con­tin­ues to set­tle af­ter Mon­day's rul­ing that so­ca su­per­star Machel Mon­tano was guilty on four as­sault charges and us­ing ob­scene lan­guage, at­tor­ney Joseph Toney has is­sued his own ap­peal for the pub­lic to "chip in to save him."

In a two-page re­lease, ti­tled "Judge Not Lest You Be Judged", yes­ter­day, Toney, the for­mer chair­man of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple, point­ed out that Mon­tano had a clean record, as he ar­gued, "a cus­to­di­al sen­tence in this in­stance will be too dra­con­ian." In­stead, he asked: "Which per­son in our so­ci­ety, in his or her younger days, has not com­mit­ted sim­i­lar acts of fol­ly?"

How­ev­er, Toney was quick to ex­plain: "This plea must not be in­ter­pret­ed as con­don­ing Machel's be­hav­iour on that fate­ful night. "He ought to have known bet­ter but let us not con­demn him. He has much more to of­fer T&T and the world with his mu­sic and his en­er­getic stage per­for­mances. "What I find dis­turb­ing is that some mem­bers of the pub­lic seem to want blood from a na­tion­al icon."

Say­ing Mon­tano had been in­stru­men­tal in plac­ing T&T on the in­ter­na­tion­al mu­sic map by show­cas­ing the coun­try's cul­ture to the world, Toney wrote: "Machel, like all oth­er in­di­vid­u­als, is not an in­fal­li­ble be­ing. "The due process of law has de­ter­mined that he was re­spon­si­ble for the in­ci­dents that tran­spired out­side the said night­club.

"What we as a peo­ple must de­ter­mine, how­ev­er, is the con­tri­bu­tion Machel has made and con­tin­ues to make to cul­ture and mu­sic in our so­ci­ety." Even as sup­port for the triple-crown win­ner con­tin­ues to pour in, it was an­nounced that Mon­tano had topped Trop­i­calfete's an­nu­al Top 100 In­ter­na­tion­al Caribbean songs for 2012.

The count­down chart looks at a va­ri­ety of cul­tures, lan­guages and rhythms from the Caribbean and se­lects songs that re­flect the re­gion's in­flu­ence on main­stream mu­sic. Mon­tano topped the list with this year's of­fer­ing Mr Fete.