$120 million ‘not enough’
Published:Friday | June 27, 2025 | 12:09 AMLivern Barrett/Senior Staff Reporter -
The “unprecedented” $120 million in damages that was awarded to 79-year-old George Williams, the mentally disabled man who languished in prison for 50 years - or his entire working life - awaiting a trial has been labelled insufficient by his family though they are ready to turn the page and move on.
At the same time, Pamela Green, Williams’ niece and primary caregiver, wants authorities to move swiftly to ensure that other mentally disabled people lost in squalid, inhumane prison conditions are reunited with their loved ones to live out their golden years.
“I don’t think the $120 million is enough, but we will satisfy with it and make it work and continue to take care of him,” Green told The Gleaner yesterday from her home in the United States (US).
“I am still grateful. We got some form of closure, and it has come to the end.”
Green, who has watched her uncle’s health deteriorate in the five years since his release from the high-security St Catherine District Prison, said she would not want to see another person suffer a similar fate.
“We wouldn’t want this to repeat itself because it is so sad for someone to sit in prison for 50 years without trial, and at the end of it is like you are just giving them a sweetie (candy) for reward,” she said.
“One hundred and twenty million dollars cannot give him back his life that he has already lost. Yes, we are grateful he is alive and that he made it out alive, but the law is so unfair.”
The comments by Green suggest that the family will not appeal the award handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday in the wrongful imprisonment lawsuit Williams filed against the Government.
It comes five years after he walked out of prison a free man.
Justice Sonya Wint Blair, who presided over the case, awarded Williams $78.6 million for compensatory damages and $42 million for vindicatory damages.
The Government had offered the family $6 million in compensation.
The $42 million awarded for vindicatory damages is $1 million per year for “the 42 years the executive did not meet the relevant statutory requirements concerning the safe custody and care of the claimant, which included the consideration of his mental health and well-being as a detainee in custody,” Wint Blair wrote in her decision.
John Clarke, the attorney who represented Williams, said he was not “particularly happy” with the sum “because I don’t think it puts the relevant value that should be placed on the loss of liberty”.
He described the total award of $120 million as unprecedented but said $1 million per year for vindicatory damages was not ideal.
“You have citizens who have gotten way more than that,” he noted.
Clarke cited the case of Roshain Clarke, the St James taxi operator who was detained four times under a state of public emergency for periods ranging from three days to seven months and later awarded $17.8 million for compensatory and vindicatory damages after the Supreme Court ruled that his detention was unconstitutional.
The well-known human rights attorney said he understands that the court has to perform a balancing act, especially since he estimates that there are about 80 persons in similar circumstances as Williams.
“I don’t know to what extent that was an appropriate consideration in arriving at the figure that they arrived at… but I understand why the court made the decision because in any event, it’s a balancing act,” he said during an interview with The Gleaner yesterday.
Williams, a Rastafarian, was taken into custody on July 21, 1970, following a knife attack on a family driving through the community of Mount Diablo, in St Catherine, according to records included in the case.
In December that year, he was charged with killing Ian Laurie, who was stabbed to death during the incident.
He was examined on February 3, 1971, and found to be suffering from schizophrenia but was in a state of partial remission.
Williams was declared unfit to plead on March 25, 1971, and was ordered to be kept in custody at the governor general’s pleasure. He remained in custody for decades without any periodic review of the case, the documents show.
Justice Wint-Blair declared in her ruling that this failure by several state agencies was a breach of his right to due process and a fair hearing by an independent and impartial court within a reasonable time.
His ordeal first came to light in a 2020 report by the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), which has oversight responsibility for the prisons.
The report revealed that he was one of seven mentally disabled men who had each spent at least 40 years in prison awaiting a trial. One of them, Noel Chambers, also a Rastafarian, died on January 27, 2020, at the age of 81 after spending 40 years in a high-security prison without a trial.
Williams was first committed to the Bellevue Hospital before being placed among convicted criminals, first at the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre, formerly known as ‘GP’ or General Penitentiary, and later at the St Catherine Adult Correctional Centre.
Evidence included in the lawsuit paints a very dark picture of his time in custody.
He said he was “essentially in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, seven days a week, on lockdown for virtually 23 hours a day”.
He complained, too, that there were no proper toilet facilities and no furniture and that a “sheet of foam was his bed for the last 50 years”.
Williams said he was more comfortable sleeping on the ground and often did because “it was better than the foam”.
He claimed that he did not receive regular medical visits and said a “head doctor” or psychiatrist would visit him once every “blue moon”.
He complained that very often, he would receive a tablet that would make him sleep, and sometimes he would not want to take it because it made him feel as though he was going to die and sometimes it “made him see ‘duppy’”.