THE prison’s external escort policy was revised last year following a court ruling which found that a prisoner had his human rights breached after being forced to attend his father’s funeral in handcuffs, a report has revealed.
In December 2022, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of former Central Market jeweller Darius Pearce, who was handcuffed while outside the prison following a risk assessment that the court described as “incapable of justification”.
Pearce was jailed in 2021 for seven-and-a-half years for three counts of money laundering.
He had applied for a temporary release licence in order to attend the funeral or, if this was deemed unacceptable, to be escorted by prison officers.
At the time, prison guidelines at HMP La Moye stated that the starting point for any escorted release would be that inmates with more than two years remaining on their sentence would have to be cuffed at all times – although this would be subject to a risk assessment.
The risk assessment had deemed that Pearce was, according to a Court of Appeal judgment, “too high a risk to be permitted to attend the funeral unless in handcuffs”.
He applied to the Royal Court to have the ruling overturned but his appeal was dismissed.
In 2022, the Court of Appeal ruled that an “error of law” was made and granted Pearce leave to seek a judicial review against the Home Affairs Minister and the prison governor.
In its judgment, the Court of Appeal said: “We are called on to assess whether the appellant’s rights under the [European] Convention [of Human Rights] have been breached and have concluded that there is no doubt that they were.”
It has now emerged that this ruling prompted the prison to revise its entire external escort policy in August last year.
According to the latest Jersey Independent Prison Monitoring Board annual report, the board received several applications relating to the appropriate use of restraint when prisoners had been escorted from the prison last year.
The external escort process was described as a “challenging area” where prison management needed to balance different considerations.
These included the security of the external location, the purpose of the visit, the prisoner’s conviction, the prisoner’s health, the risk of escape, the risk to the public and the risk of meeting victims.
The report revealed that the revision of HMP La Moye’s external escort policy also looked at matters such as the individual risk assessment undertaken to assess the risk of each prisoner prior to the escort taking place, and the strength of the escort and restraint which is based upon the assessment.
The Jersey Independent Prison Monitoring Board said it would continue to monitor external escorts throughout 2024.
