A High Court judge yesterday ordered the Trinidad Express newspaper to pay $325,000 in damages to former chairman of the Police Service Commission (PSC) Nizam Mohammed for a report published in 2010. Justice Mira Dean-Armorer ordered the payment after delivering an oral ruling in favour of Mohammed in his defamation lawsuit. Dean-Armorer was presiding in the Port-of-Spain High Court.
In the lawsuit, Mohammed, an attorney, claimed the article was irresponsibly published and was against the “tenets of responsible journalism.” The report, published on July 23, 2010, centred on comments attributed to former president of the Public Services Association (PSA) and PNM labour relations officer Jennifer Baptiste-Primus, about Mohammed’s appointment to the commission. The report was published two days after former president George Maxwell Richards announced Mohammed’s appointment.
In his lawsuit, Mohammed claimed the report alleged that he was unfit for the position because of his alleged professional misconduct in a matter involving the PSA. “I have never been retained by the PSA to provide legal services of any kind, whether it be work of an advisory nature or appearances in court. I was therefore shocked on reading the purported allegations of Baptiste-Primus reported in the Daily Express, which were patently untrue,” Mohammed said in his witness statement.
Mohammed claimed after the publication he was ridiculed by his colleagues. “I therefore continued and to this day continue to be very distressed and humiliated by the imputations made in the article,” Mohammed said. According to the evidence, a day after the report was published, the newspaper published a correction saying that Baptiste-Primus did not identify Mohammed or make the allegations against him.
Mohammed, in his claim, said the corrections were insufficient to correct the damage done by the initial publication. “The corrections did not constitute a wholehearted, adequate, or any apology or a full or frank withdrawal of the defamatory words and were not capable of erasing or mitigating the sting of the defamatory words or the defamatory imputations conveyed thereby,” Mohammed said in his statement.
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Omatie Lyder, in her witness statement, said she wrote the correction and thought it sufficient to correct the errors in the article. Mohammed was represented by Senior Counsel Fyard Hosein and attorney Nyree Alfonso, and Farees Hosein represented the newspaper.