High Court confirms Holiday's conviction

June 02, 2010 6:31 AM

PHILIPSBURG--The High Court in The Hague has rejected the appeal of former police chief commissioner Derrick Holiday. The Joint Court's verdict of March 2009 was upheld, which means that Holiday will remain banned from carrying out police tasks.

Holiday was sentenced on March 26, 2009, on appeal, to one year suspended,with two years' probation, 180 hours of community service and a three-year ban from the Police Force.

He was found guilty of forgery of 43 Immigration documents in 2004 and of fraud in falsely claiming a rent allowance from the Central Government between February 2004 and June 2007.

The ban from the force was one of the grounds for the appeal filed by high-profile

attorney-at-law Gerard Spong. According to his lawyer, Holiday could not be banned from his office for crimes such as forgery and fraud, at least not in these cases. Besides, the Joint Court of the Netherlands and Antilles and Aruba also had insufficiently motivated this element of his client's punishment, the lawyer had claimed.

The High Court ruled on Tuesday that the motivation for this complaint was insufficient. The complaint was not severe enough "because it is sufficiently clear to requestor on what legal regulations the concomitant punishment is based."

The High Court judges further stated that forgery and fraud were sufficient grounds to ban somebody from office.

Spong had also objected to several other elements in his client's punishment. According to him, the Joint Court should not have used his client's statement concerning the forgery as evidence, but as a so-called appeal on "excusable miscarriage of justice."

Holiday had stated that former Lt. Governor Franklyn Richards had agreed with the introduction of the so-called re-entry Immigration documents, which he had forged in cooperation with several co-suspects, among them former police commissioner Marcel Loor.

However, the High Court ruled that Holiday's lawyer Joeri Essed had made insufficiently clear during the handling of the appeal in the Joint Court that the former chief commissioner had wanted to plead for miscarriage of justice.

"It may be expected of a member of the legal profession to explicitly state what pleas will be brought forward and how they must be labelled," the Court stated.

In connection with the fraud case, Spong had argued there was insufficient proof Holiday had deliberately concealed the fact that in 2004 he had purchased the house he had previously been renting. But also in this case, the High Court found that the Joint Court had provided enough evidence for a conviction.

"The moment [Holiday] was no longer tenant of his house he should have made a halt to the rent allowance. Although he no longer was entitled to rent allowance and, as the Joint Court correctly stated, he should have understood this, the allowance was still paid out to him."

Spong's objection was that the Joint Court had failed to use an important statement by Holiday that the Lt. Governor, who is responsible for the payment of rent allowances, had been aware that he had become the owner of the house.

The High Court rejected this statement. "Apparently, the Joint Court considered requestor's statement so incredible that it did not feel obligated to respond."

In its ruling, the High Court also pointed out two small errors. In the Joint Court's ruling, Holiday's ban from the force was based on Articles 33 and 34 of the Penal Code of the Netherlands Antilles. This should have been Article 32, the High Court said.

The second error was that the High Court was not in the possession of Spong's power of attorney to represent Holiday at the High Court. This actually should have led to the High Court declaring Holiday's case inadmissible, but the High Court had decided to refrain from doing so.

(Source: The Daily Herald Soint Maarten)

1 June 2010