Po­lice are con­tin­u­ing their search for a Princes Town man who man­aged to es­cape from the Princes Town Mag­is­trates’ Court af­ter be­ing sen­tenced to prison for dri­ving with an ex­pired dri­ver’s per­mit last Wednes­day.

Re­ports in­di­cate that the 29-year-old sus­pect ap­peared vir­tu­al­ly from the Vir­tu­al Ac­cess Cus­tomer Cen­tre (VACC) to an­swer his charges.

The mag­is­trate sen­tenced him to ten months in prison with hard labour.

How­ev­er, po­lice stat­ed that due to an on­go­ing is­sue be­tween court se­cu­ri­ty and law en­force­ment of­fi­cers, no no­ti­fi­ca­tion was sent to have po­lice of­fi­cers on stand­by to es­cort the sus­pect to the po­lice sta­tion in the event of a cus­to­di­al sen­tence.

As a re­sult, the sus­pect sim­ply walked out of the court and dis­ap­peared.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice, the sus­pect, who had ini­tial­ly been out on bail, ap­peared be­fore a mag­is­trate who stood down the mat­ter be­fore ul­ti­mate­ly sen­tenc­ing him to prison.

The pros­e­cu­tor re­quest­ed that the court re­call the man, who had left the room, so that of­fi­cers could be dis­patched to de­tain him. How­ev­er, the mag­is­trate did not grant this re­quest, and court se­cu­ri­ty did not in­ter­vene as the man hur­ried out of the build­ing.

While po­lice of­fi­cers are as­signed to the court, au­thor­i­ties ex­plained that the VACC is not con­sid­ered part of the court it­self.

As a re­sult, no of­fi­cers are sta­tioned there, de­spite its lo­ca­tion with­in the same build­ing.

An of­fi­cer ex­plained that the stan­dard pro­ce­dure when a Mag­is­trates’ Court is­sues a cus­to­di­al sen­tence is for the court to in­form the po­lice—usu­al­ly the In­spec­tor of the Court and Process Unit or the Le­gal Of­fi­cer—so that armed of­fi­cers can be po­si­tioned out­side.

How­ev­er, as per the court man­ag­er’s di­rec­tive, se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers do not al­low po­lice of­fi­cers to en­ter the court build­ing while armed. Con­se­quent­ly, the sus­pect was not in law­ful po­lice cus­tody at the time of his es­cape.

Po­lice con­firmed that the sus­pect was a re­peat of­fend­er. In No­vem­ber 2022, he was ap­pre­hend­ed dur­ing a po­lice ex­er­cise in Princes Town and lat­er charged with dri­ving while dis­qual­i­fied from hold­ing or ob­tain­ing a dri­ver’s li­cence, as well as dri­ving with­out an in­sur­ance cer­tifi­cate.

A Princes Town mag­is­trate fined him $6,000 af­ter he plead­ed guilty to the charges. —KEVON FELMINE