A High Court Judge is ex­pect­ed to rule on a law­suit over the pro­mo­tion as­sess­ment process for the rank of As­sis­tant Su­per­in­ten­dent of Po­lice (ASP) in mid-Feb­ru­ary. 

Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad set the ap­prox­i­mate time frame for de­liv­er­ing his judg­ment in the case brought by In­spec­tor Mark Her­nan­dez af­ter pre­sid­ing over a case man­age­ment con­fer­ence yes­ter­day morn­ing. 

Dur­ing the hear­ing, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad de­ter­mined ev­i­den­tial ob­jec­tions raised by the par­ties and al­so de­fined the ex­tent to which wit­ness­es could be cross-ex­am­ined when the case goes to tri­al in Jan­u­ary, next year. 

Her­nan­dez was the head of the now-de­funct Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT), which was es­tab­lished un­der the tenure of for­mer po­lice com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith. 

How­ev­er, he has been on sus­pen­sion since May 2021, when he was charged with mis­be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice in re­la­tion to an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the treat­ment of the sus­pects held for the ab­duc­tion and mur­der of An­drea Bharatt, in­clud­ing two who died while in po­lice cus­tody. 

There is no le­gal im­ped­i­ment for of­fi­cers to be pro­mot­ed while they have pend­ing crim­i­nal cas­es. 

In the law­suit, Her­nan­dez is con­tend­ing that col­leagues with­out per­for­mance ap­praisals were al­lowed to par­tic­i­pate in the pro­mo­tion ex­er­cise. 

His lawyers are claim­ing that Her­nan­dez and oth­er of­fi­cers re­ceived blan­ket “out­stand­ing” rat­ings with­out their per­for­mance be­ing crit­i­cal­ly as­sessed. 

They sug­gest­ed that the “uni­ver­sal mark pro­ce­dure’ was con­trary to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) mer­it-based sys­tem of pro­mo­tion pol­i­cy. 

Af­ter Her­nan­dez and a col­league, In­spec­tor Vene­ta Weaver-Ali, both filed sim­i­lar cas­es over the is­sue, Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (DCP) Natasha George ad­mit­ted an er­ror in the pro­mo­tion ex­er­cise. 

In her af­fi­davit, George ad­mit­ted that she wrong­ly ad­vised Odyssey Con­sult­inc Lim­it­ed, which was hired by the TTPS to as­sist with the pro­mo­tion ex­er­cise, to al­low all par­tic­i­pants to ad­vance to the sec­ond stage of the process even if they failed to at­tain the pass mark in the ex­am­i­na­tion stage. 

She claimed that she was sub­se­quent­ly ad­vised that on­ly the “top-per­form­ing can­di­dates” could ad­vance based on the reg­u­la­tions. 

“I, there­fore, act­ed on a mis­tak­en ba­sis in in­form­ing Odyssey to per­mit all can­di­dates from stage one to ad­vance to stage two of the process,” George said. 

De­spite the ad­mis­sion, the case is still be­ing pur­sued.