By Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to the persecution of the teacher Adriana King, with the view being that the state has taken five years to abandon a charge it has now told the Court of Appeal it doesn’t want to pursue.
On Wednesday, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in its Appellate Jurisdiction or the Court of Appeal sitting for St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), allowed an appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions and overturned the permanent stay that a magistrate had granted in a criminal case against Adriana King. On the face of it, the state won.
The Crown counsel representing the state then told that same court something every Vincentian should be concerned about. He posited that the director of public prosecutions had no interest in pursuing the case against Adriana King at all. The appeal had been brought to obtain a ruling from the Court of Appeal on when a magistrate may stop a case for delay. The presiding Justice of Appeal, Trevor Ward KC, said he was holding the director of public prosecutions to his word. The matter now goes back down to the magistrate’s court, where the prosecution is expected to discontinue it.
On Aug. 5, 2021, there were protests in Kingstown against the law that required public sector workers to be vaccinated, and on that day the then prime minister of SVG was struck and taken to hospital. Whatever anybody thinks of the vaccine mandate, a head of government was injured in the streets of the capital, Kingstown, and that is unacceptable. The state was not only entitled to investigate what happened on that day; it was obliged to.
But that is not what the Adriana King case was about. The charge brought against Adriana King under the Public Order Act (Cap. 396) of the laws of SVG was that she attempted to impede, or to prevent, the then prime minister’s access to the House of Assembly. Not that she threw anything or that she touched anybody or that she was responsible for the injury sustained by the same prime minister. She was criminally charged because she allegedly attempted to impede his access. The charge began as obstruction and was amended more than once to include an attempt, just an attempt, to obstruct.
King’s account is that she was at the prison gate at the time, broadcasting live on Facebook, and that the prime minister entered by the side gate to the Parliament compound. The police account, given by the officer who now leads our police force as acting commissioner, placed the incident at the market gate. His evidence is the only evidence against Kinga in the criminal matter.
When King was charged, she was interdicted. This means that she was barred from work as a teacher and paid half of her salary. Her end-of-year teachers’ allowance was stopped as well. In October 2023, she, through her legal counsel, applied for the case to be stayed for delay, and on May 28, 2024, Magistrate John Ballah granted a permanent stay, finding inordinate delay and a failure to hear the matter within a reasonable time.
Even after that stay, King remained on half pay, because her interdiction was never formally stopped. It took the SVG Teachers’ Union to intervene on her behalf and on April 10, 2026, the Union announced that the Public Service Commission had confirmed in writing that King’s full salary was restored. She received it, with back payments, at the end of April. It will be interesting to see if her end-of-year teachers’ allowance will be paid in December. After all, she is still appointed as a graduate teacher, though she is not actively teaching in any classroom in SVG.
It took the state four years and nine months from August 2021 to April 2026 to pay Adriana King her full salary on a charge for which the Director of Public Prosecutions says he has no interest. Four years and nine months on half of a teacher’s salary. Four years and nine months, with a mortgage to service on half pay, yet no court has ever found her guilty of anything in relation to the matter with which she was charged.
Section 8(1) of the Constitution of SVG says that if a person is charged with a criminal offence, then unless the charge is withdrawn, that person is entitled to a fair hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial court. Five years and three months is what the state has delivered in this matter and now there has been a finding that that delay was not inordinate or prejudicial to Adriana King. Further, the charge was never withdrawn; it was simply carried on, year after year, over her head and over her pay packet.
On Wednesday, the Court of Appeal did not decide that the delay was acceptable. It decided a narrower legal point: that the magistrate’s court guidelines on delay are not binding limits. The court noted that of the adjournments over two years, five were down to the defendant, two to the prosecution and one to the court. Vincentians should understand what the ruling now means for the next Vincentian to face this situation and remember it could be you.
A magistrate’s power to stop a stale case has been narrowed, and it was narrowed in a case the prosecution has told Vincentians it has no interest in taking to trial. When prosecution authorities say that they have no interest in trying a criminal case, it can mean several things, including an insufficiency of evidence or a lack of public interest in the matter, amongst others. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has not yet said what their reason or reasons are, but Vincentians should pay close attention to the answer when it comes, if it ever does.
If the Director of Public Prosecutions had no interest in this case, why was Adriana King still a defendant? The honest answer is that she was used as a vehicle. The state needed a set of facts to take up to the Court of Appeal to settle a point of law about magistrates, and hers were the facts available at the time. A Vincentian teacher spent two years after a magistrate stayed her criminal case as an accused person so that the law could be clarified for everybody else.
That, however, is one way in which the law grows and becomes clearer. Lawyers call it learning or jurisprudence. However, it does not remove the point that Adriana King will go down in history as having lost a case before the Court of Appeal in a criminal matter, as the press has been reporting this week. It is something she will have to explain to employers and others for the rest of her natural life.
There is a saying that the law is synonymous with the colloquial name for a donkey and this is one such situation. Lawyers and judges all over the Eastern Caribbean now have a clear answer to a legal question, while a Vincentian is left in a perpetual state of having to defend their character.
A conviction is a punishment the law allows after a criminal case has been proved. What happened to Adriana King is a punishment the law never authorised and nobody ever proved. She has spent five years as an accused woman barred from her job. After five years, the state tells a court it has no interest in the matter. What Adriana has been denied is a finding that clears her name, the one thing a discontinuance will never give her.
We on a View from the Outside urge the director of public prosecutions to follow through on his promise to the court and discontinue this charge at its earliest convenience and do not let it drag on.
Though there is a court ruling, laws passed in Parliament carry more weight. The attorney general should tell Vincentians whether this country intends to put any limit at all on how long a criminal charge may hang over a person before it must be tried or dropped, because section 8(1) of the Constitution plainly is not doing that work on its own. Like many other provisions in our Constitution, it needs clarification, which legislation can fix.
So in the coming days, when somebody tells you that Adriana King lost her criminal appeal, tell them what else happened in that courtroom. The prosecution told the Court of Appeal it has no interest in the case. Then ask them how a teacher ends up on half pay for nearly five years over a charge that nobody intends to prove. Remember, the next victim could be you.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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