Fitzger­ald Hinds, our be­lea­guered Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, has been re­port­ed as stat­ing the fol­low­ing on the Brent Thomas case:

“Crim­i­nals have friends every­where in this coun­try. They have them in the Po­lice Ser­vice…in the Cus­toms…in Im­mi­gra­tion…in the De­fence Force…in the Ju­di­cia­ry…in the Par­lia­ment.”

The state­ment has gen­er­at­ed con­sid­er­able per­plex­i­ty and re­sis­tance from dif­fer­ent quar­ters of so­ci­ety, par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­bers of the Ju­di­cia­ry, lawyers, the Op­po­si­tion, and the judge him­self.

And such push­back is pro­ceed­ing with­out Hinds pro­vid­ing the pub­lic with any ev­i­dence of his charge. In­deed, even if he has the ev­i­dence, it does not ap­pear he can de­fend it.

And so, with his craw ap­par­ent­ly full to over­flow­ing, he chose to get his charge out even if he risked in­flam­ing his de­trac­tors. He could then stand his ground while claim­ing he didn’t call any names.

It ap­pears al­so that, since he must have known that his charge would trou­ble pub­lic trust in the Ju­di­cia­ry, even to the point of gen­er­at­ing pub­lic op­pro­bri­um for judges and mag­is­trates (and po­lice­men, sol­diers, and par­lia­men­tar­i­ans, for that mat­ter), he thought his un­sup­port­ed (and prob­a­bly un­sup­port­able) charge was worth the price of pub­lic out­rage.

Hinds did not make a lit­er­al charge that there are cor­rupt judges around, but that mes­sage was re­ceived nonethe­less by many. How did that hap­pen?

His state­ment has at least two sens­es: one lit­er­al, the oth­er prag­mat­ic.

In the lit­er­al sense, he’s telling us that, as Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, he has in­for­ma­tion that crim­i­nals have friends every­where in the coun­try, but es­pe­cial­ly in five ar­eas: Cus­toms, Im­mi­gra­tion, the De­fence Force, the Ju­di­cia­ry, and Par­lia­ment.

He can tell us so be­cause, as Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, he’s in a po­si­tion to know and be­cause he has de­ter­mined that it is in­for­ma­tion we will want to have, if we don’t al­ready have it.

But why will we want to have it? He doesn’t tell us, so we have to have re­course to a prag­mat­ic in­ter­pre­ta­tion, which will com­prise a set of in­fer­ences en­tailed in his lit­er­al state­ment, which in­fer­ences he con­sid­ers to be shared by so­ci­ety and his good self.

One in­fer­ence is that those five ar­eas are so sen­si­tive to the prop­er gov­er­nance of the coun­try that it is un­ac­cept­able that crim­i­nals should have friends in them.

For ex­am­ple, we gen­er­al­ly hold that it is un­ac­cept­able for a crim­i­nal to be friends with a judge.

A sec­ond in­fer­ence is that crim­i­nals, al­ready cor­rupt, would cor­rupt cus­toms of­fi­cers, im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cers, sol­diers, judges, and par­lia­men­tar­i­ans if they be­came friends with these gate­keep­ers of so­ci­ety.

This is be­cause of two things prin­ci­pal­ly: 1) we have come to be­lieve that hu­man na­ture is greedy in that it pre­dis­pos­es us to il­le­gal­ly ac­quire as much ma­te­r­i­al wealth as pos­si­ble, even at the ex­pense of the hap­pi­ness of oth­ers; and 2) his­to­ry teach­es us that so­cial evo­lu­tion and ex­pan­sion are in­eluctably ac­com­pa­nied by cor­rup­tion.

A third in­fer­ence is that Brent Thomas, the firearms deal­er whose con­sti­tu­tion­al com­plaint was up­held by the Court (Ram­per­sad, D J), may have had his com­plaint up­held be­cause he is friends with the judge.

These in­fer­ences amount to a prag­mat­ic in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Hinds’ charge. Since the lit­er­al sense is clear­ly in­suf­fi­cient com­mu­ni­ca­tion-wise, Min­is­ter Hinds must have been re­ly­ing on our prag­mat­ic sense.

He didn’t call names, but then he didn’t need to since he had the ad­van­tages of the pub­lic’s prag­mat­ic in­ter­pre­ta­tion. A prag­mat­ic read­ing of a lit­er­al mes­sage is nor­mal in all so­ci­eties.

In T&T, if a taxi dri­ver told a pas­sen­ger he has just picked up that she was still out­side, she would open the door and close it prop­er­ly this time for she would in­ter­pret the taxi-dri­ver’s mes­sage to be that she hadn’t closed the door se­cure­ly the first time.

Con­sid­er this oth­er ex­am­ple, which is a lit­tle more com­plex. A crime re­porter re­ports as fol­lows:

“The gun­man roll down the back win­dow and spray the men in front of the build­ing.”

The read­er un­der­stands that the two events, “rolling down” and “spray­ing”, have al­ready oc­curred and are in the past even though there is noth­ing on the verbs that in­di­cates past time–or any­thing else for that mat­ter.

So that we may in­ter­pret the re­porter to be in­ter­est­ed not in the time of the ac­tions but rather in their im­me­di­a­cy/vi­vid­i­ty. That’s a prag­mat­ic in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the tense­less gram­mar.

Ram­per­sad, D J de­nies that he has crim­i­nal friends and shows he has caught Hinds’ prag­mat­ic mes­sage when he says:

“(W)hen one of its own of­fi­cers, in the con­text of dis­cussing a case be­fore the court, a case which is not yet com­plet­ed be­fore the court, says to the na­tion that crim­i­nals have friends in the ju­di­cia­ry, the ob­vi­ous in­ten­tion is to more than just crit­i­cise the ju­di­cia­ry but to go fur­ther to sug­gest that, in some way, il­le­gal­i­ty is in­flu­enc­ing the de­ci­sions of these judges, mas­ters and mag­is­trates, there­by jeop­ar­dis­ing the Ju­di­cia­ry as a whole.”

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He al­so has writ­ten hun­dreds of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com