PULL QUOTE: ‘It was the most satisfying time of my career. For many years, I was on just one side of the Bar; prosecuting was my total focus’  

PULL QUOTE: ‘I would go back on the bench if I could. In fact, I had wanted to become a judge; but while you can apply to be a magistrate, you must be invited to be a judge’

BERTLYN Gretna Reynolds could safely be described as one of the finest and most competent magistrates that Guyana has ever had! She lasted for two years on the Bench before the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) decided against renewing her contract on the ground that she was allowing her religious faith to get in the way of her work. Ms Reynolds, 48, has always been serious about her religious faith. Growing up, she attended two Anglican schools, namely the St. Ambrose Primary and the Bishops’ High School. She has five siblings and was born and raised in Georgetown. Midway in her high school career, she started attending the Seventh Day Adventist Church as a fervent believer. The Seventh Day followers embrace the doctrine of the sacredness of the Sabbath day, and Ms Reynolds has accepted Saturday as her day of rest and of worship.

As to why she came off the bench, Ms Reynolds said: “There was a misunderstanding in the media, and it went out in the public like if I had resigned.  Actually, two of my supervisors in the judiciary had a clash over me. One was telling the other to discipline me because I was allowing my religious beliefs to affect how I work, referring to my not attending magistrates’ conferences on the Sabbath.”

All of this happened at the time when her contract was up for renewal, she recalled in an interview with the Guyana Chronicle recently. So, instead of having her disciplined, the matter was taken to the JSC for its recommendation. “The JSC did not renew my contract because I continued to decline to do any work on Sabbaths (Saturdays) that was not in the nature of emergencies,” she disclosed.

Ms Reynolds thoroughly enjoyed her tenure as a magistrate, and as to the possibility of a future on the Bench, she had this to say: “I would go back on the bench if I could. In fact, I had wanted to become a judge; but while you can apply to be a magistrate, you must be invited to be a judge.”

She believes she did her best work when she was a magistrate. “I got my decisions out on time and fully written up. There is usually this backlog of undocumented decisions. What happens a lot is that people hand down decisions, but never stop to document them, because there is so much work.  

“Sometimes people’s matters cannot get to the appeal level because the magistrate has not submitted any record; there is nothing but the verbally handed down decision.
“I heeded the warning of my senior colleagues against this, so I never handed down a single decision until I had fully reduced it to a computerized document. When I was leaving (the magistracy), the clerks were able to collect records of all my decisions in well-tabulated notebooks and to make transcripts,” she proudly recalled.

Ms Reynolds also made it a point to seriously consider matters and even pray a lot before handing down her decisions. “It was the most satisfying time of my career. For many years, I was on just one side of the Bar; prosecuting was my total focus.  

“Now, when you are a magistrate, you are not on the prosecuting side; you are on both sides.  You have to now weigh who is right and who is wrong, not whose arguments are more persuasive. It is not about who you admired for years at the Bar.

“I thoroughly enjoyed my two years of being a magistrate,” she declared.

However, the most interesting time of her career was when she was pursuing her Masters at Howard University in Washington D.C., United States of America (USA). “This was because I got to compare the US law with our Caribbean law.”
After coming off the Bench in 2006, she went back to the US to do a Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Michigan. Before leaving, though, she launched a private practice. She is now an attorney with an office on Croal Street.

She had spent the first six years of her legal career at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP); and in her last year there, she served on secondment to the Guyana Police Force as the Senior Legal Advisor.

She has also taught periodically at the University of Guyana (UG).

While studying for her Masters, she had applied to become a magistrate, but got response to her application sometime after her return to Guyana, when the suspension of the various commissions ended and the JSC was revived.

At the time, she was teaching at UG and also working on the Disciplined Forces Commission.  “So they waited two months for me, and then I became a magistrate, she recalled.

Naturally unbiased

Ms Reynolds explained that her parents coined the name ‘Bertlyn’ by merging parts of their own names, Bertie and Gwendolyn.    Ms Reynolds is a very petite, jovial woman. When describing her personality, she says: “I am pretty sensitive and tactful. I am very pleasant, very positive, and I am really naturally unbiased. I have a lot of heart. I like to joke a lot because it relieves a lot of the stress or tension of life.”

Speaking of her hobbies and philosophy of life, Ms. Reynolds related: “I love music – playing and singing it, although I am not a natural musician, just a trained musician. I like reading and writing; I like literary things. I also like sewing and photography. I live by the Golden Rule: You cannot like everybody or be close to everybody, but you can treat everybody civilly, like you want to be treated.”

She said she is very conscious about the need for the world at large, and Guyana in particular, to be able to celebrate the diversity that exists. She believes that Guyana is tense like it is mostly because of prejudice.

“I do not think that ethnic diversity needs to mean (or should lead to) ethnic divisiveness. I think that there can be unity in diversity. It is at the back of a lot of the other crises, political and all others.

“If people are unable to appreciate the beauty that lies in having people of different kinds, then all is lost, really, in religion, politics, law, life. It is not inconceivable for everybody in a society to be law-abiding. It has happened, and it can if people want it to.”