Asha Javeed
Lead Editor Investigations
asha.javeed@guardian.co.tt
Justice in the country’s courts does not favour the poor. It was this insight gained from her in-service
at Alpha Chambers as a law student at Hugh Wooding, which led Hasine Shaikh to volunteer to do legal aid when she graduated as a lawyer in 2008.
Years later, with enough experience in the criminal courts doing legal aid even while employed in private practice, she applied for and became T&T’s first Chief Public Defender in March 2020. Insight is now intelligence used to build a team of 30 lawyers at the public defender’s department with just a job description and her vast experience in handling criminal matters. She advocates for young men.
“I realised that the persons who are in that legal aid bracket, they weren’t getting necessarily ... I don’t want to say brand name lawyers, but they weren’t getting the best of the best because clearly, they couldn’t afford that,” the 39-year-old lawyer told the Women’s Empowerment (WE) magazine in an interview at her Port-of-Spain office last week.
She recalled one of the first cases she did was an incident where a man was being beaten up and threw a fishing implement at the person. The man, she said, was charged with wounding with intent. “The circumstances were pretty clear that it was in the context of a fight. He was being beaten up. He was a very small guy. I just felt like, if you didn’t have proper representation there was a real likelihood that things could have gone badly for him,” she recalled.
But for her, poor people who commit acts of crime or are victims of crime are not very literate in most cases. “They don’t know their rights. And I don’t want to say the police take advantage of them, but they kind of do. What it boils down to, is that they are the persons who will give a statement because no lawyer comes in to tell them not to. I just felt very strongly about it,” she said.
Defending citizens’ rights through criminal law tends to be emotionally taxing and not as financially rewarding as other arms of the law, she observed.
“I tell my staff all the time to do criminal law, and to do this job, you’re not doing it for the money. You’re doing it because it’s a calling. You have to really believe that you want to make a difference for this to make sense and it’s hard. It is not an easy job, because I mean, you’re being exposed to literally the worst situations, because crime is not pretty, and it’s not a nice thing to have to read through these types of files. And you know, there are things that you deal with; sexual offences, you deal with murders, you deal with things with children. It’s hard to stomach, but you have to remember the why of what you’re doing,” she said.
Last week, Shaikh, along with 15 other attorneys, was granted silk. She is the youngest female to be granted senior counsel status. While a professional achievement, she reckons there is a lot more work to be done in the criminal courts.
In the two years she has been in office, they have dealt with 318 matters and have 2,000 active in the system. There’s still a backlog of 1,600; 800 of them are over ten years old and 400 are over 15 years old.
She observed that currently there are 15 criminal judges in the system. “And each one of those judges for my last check has over 100 matters on your docket. So, if you have over 100 matters on your docket, you can only deal with a particular number of matters for any given time frame. You might be able to complete four in a month, but four in a month is still not going to be a significant dent in 100-plus matters that are on your dockets,” she said.
Building out the Public Defenders’ Department
Shaikh was hired in the month that the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but being classified as an essential worker allowed her to build out her team and train them, which was an opportunity which she might not have had otherwise.
As a result, the department is fully electronic, which makes case management easier. In addition to providing public defences at the courts, she said her staff comment on criminal legislation in Parliament, process all criminal applications for legal aid in the prison–a long list of people on any given day, deal with people who wish to plead guilty but don’t have an indictment, and do bail applications for anyone who requires bail.
She does not believe that police explain to anyone charged with a crime that they have the right to a lawyer. But in court, it will be explained given the abolition of preliminary inquiries.
“They will tell you that you are entitled to representation and if you can’t afford one will be provided for you, they will tell you okay, but whether that happens before that stage, I don’t know. And the thing about it is most people may not be as aware of the Public Defenders’ Department specifically,” she said.
“We don’t want them to just think you’re getting a free lawyer and no quality right? We want you to know that you’re getting a lawyer that has been trained, a lawyer that has the requisite experience, or a lawyer that is putting in the work to make sure that you get the representation that is fair and just to get you through the system. And that is something that we’ve really been working towards.”
She added, “We have no shortage of things to do. The job of the Public Defenders’ Department is to step in and provide effective, efficient and quality representation. And because we’re coming in at a later stage, this is our full-time job. We’re not doing any other matter. It means that we’re able to respond quickly. I think the problem that existed prior to us was that you had a very small pool of attorneys who were defence counsel.
“So at any given time, it’s occasioned by the fact that one of these attorneys has to be in another court, you can’t be everywhere at the same time. But for us, like for the month of July, all our lawyers are essentially on trial. But it means that we are in a number of different courts. There’s not anyone or two trying to juggle one or two matters and trying to do it without causing delay,” she said.
She observed that the three-day stint as a temporary senator for the United National Congress (UNC) before she assumed her present job was to contribute to criminal bills. “I always believe that when you’re called upon to serve, you should do it. There are so many people who wish to have an opportunity, to have a voice on key issues, and they don’t get that opportunity, but I was being given that opportunity,” she said.
“And I remember, at that time, I still felt very strongly about the Public Defenders’ Department and having a division like this.”
Shaikh, who hails from east Trinidad, was among the first graduating class of the Specialist Learning Centre and then graduated from St Augustine Girls’ High School. She acknowledged the cultural norms of growing up in an East Indian family where the pressure was on to be a doctor or a lawyer.
But she wasn’t a fan of Chemistry or blood so it came down to law. “Law captivated me,” she said.
The Advocate
Most of her clients are between the ages of 16 to 25. “We don’t have that many female clients. The vast majority of our clients are men,” she said. For now and as a boy-mom of a six year old, she uses the platform she has built out to advocate for young men. When asked about the country’s crime situation, she said that was why she does outreach.
“So something as simple as sexual offences ... seems to think only if you have sex with a young girl that’s the offence. No, you gotta touch them either. But they don’t know. And that goes back to literacy, it goes back to our culture. It’s just recently we made marriage idioms. So we can’t pretend that it wasn’t acceptable to have relationships with younger people. It’s only a recent development. So that culture change of explaining to blue signs, this is not acceptable. And this is what the law says,” she added.
“We need to invest in the children. We need them to know that they’re important. We need to educate them and empower them from an early age, and I have a very young child, so it is very relevant to me. It’s ingrained in me because I know for me, personally, this is my job.
“The most important job I will ever do is raising my child. That’s the most important job because I can leave here and somebody else is gonna come. But my child, that’s me, and I think that investment in children is important. And that is the citizen part of me that always steps in and says what can we do to make things better? What do we do to make a positive impact? We know children are coming into guns at younger and younger ages. We know that the reality of children being influenced is high. We know that people are not being educated on what their rights are. So how do we change those things? “When I was doing law, I remember asking one of my lecturers, how do you defend criminals? And he said to me, ‘My job is to ensure that they have a fair trial. My job is not to determine whether they did it or not.’ That’s not our job. Our job is to ensure that their rights are respected and with the processes, you know, our investigation will follow it in any way that it should have been done to test the State’s case because a man charged does not automatically meet that person is guilty.
“And that’s what our job is. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the person is innocent or guilty, and I’ve always approached it ... I don’t have a personal opinion when it comes to it.”
Shaikh is very cognisant that there is a divide between her personal opinion and her job. To do this, she compartmentalises her life.
“I have a very supportive family. My husband is wonderful. My son, I want him to appreciate that women work. And women are part of society and a strong woman is not necessarily the person who’s cooking in the kitchen, although I do that too. When I go home, it’s homework, and mommy and wife,” she said.
