…commission says he acted responsibly during riot

By Shauna Jemmott
THE REPORT of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Georgetown Prison riot cleared Deputy Director of Prisons Gladwin Samuels of accusations levelled against him by prisoners that he had given an order to officers to ‘lock the door and let them burn’ during a fire on the Capital A block, which resulted in the death of 17 prisoners on March 3.

“… it was clear on the basis of evidence advanced that there was no basis for this claim or indeed that any other was guilty of such a heinous act,” the CoI report states.

The allegation was made by some prisoners that Samuels ordered the door to be locked and let prisoners burn while the fire blazed violently in the dormitory which housed remand prisoners, during the worst prison riot recorded in the history of Guyana.

The report into the CoI into the March 2 to 4 Georgetown Prison riots and resultant deaths was prepared by Chairman of the Commission, Justice James Patterson, and Commissioners Dale Erskine and Merle Mendonce, and submitted to President David Granger by Justice Patterson on June 1, at the Office of the President.
“This is an extremely serious allegation and the Commission of Inquiry considered it very carefully,” the report stated.

It said though evidence by prisoners, which seem concocted, accused Samuels of passing an order to lock the door and leave the Capital A prisoners locked in the burning building to die, “video evidence, journal entries and oral evidence show Mr. Samuels was not in the prison yard at the time the door of the Capital A Block was ordered locked”.

The Commission said too that testimonies also revealed that Samuels acted responsibly assisting in the evacuation of the prisoners from Capital B Block and giving orders to officers under his leadership, to extinguish the deadly fire on March 3.

“He (Samuels) was also heard telling prisoners in Capital A to exit the burning building from Capital B Division. In this regard, a prisoner did exit Capital A through the hole created in the dividing wall of that division. He did suffer burns on his body while going through that hole.”

Additionally, Assistant Superintendent of Prisons, K. Hudson admitted that he ordered Cadet Officer Udistaire Holligan to lock the door after observing the prisoners approaching aggressively, armed with sharpened instruments.

Murder accused Kenneth Griffith, Errol Kesney, and Carol Brown were just a few of the prisoners who testified during the CoI, accusing Samuels of giving the order to lock the door causing seventeen prisoners to die as a result of the fire.

Condemned prisoner Carl Brown said he heard when Samuels told officers “Ya’ll lock de door deh let deh burn (expletives) leh deh dead!”

However, Barrister-at-law Selwyn Pieters, who made legal representation for the Georgetown Prison during the hearings, had submitted to the Commission that while inmates made the troubling accusations against Samuels, objective evidence presented to the Commission revealed that the Deputy Director of Prisons was not yet in the Camp Street jail yard when the order was passed for the door to be locked.

“This can only occur where they have concocted a plan to frame him as a scapegoat, to conceal the true perpetrators, who in a bizarre way tampered with, and made inoperable, the very door that would have guaranteed their escape in a matter of seconds from the fire that was obviously lit by the prisoners themselves,” Samuels submitted.

He said the prisoners had perhaps lit the fire and secured the door “without being fully cognizant of the real danger of being trapped in that dormitory if a raging inferno ensued that could affect the lock on the door that was their own major means of escape to safety”.

The lawyer stated too that the door which was locked even before Samuels reached the compound, remained locked “due to the inmates jamming the housing mechanism of the door..”
Officers were finally able to open the door only after the fire claimed the lives of 17 inmates and injured 30 others, Pieters said.

Samuels was sent on leave March 4, and returned to his job as Deputy Director of Prisons Monday.