Attorney General Dale Marshall urged Caribbean governments to heed the landmark Tot Lampkin v Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago ruling as a stark warning that state failures in responding to domestic violence can prove fatal.
He told journalists at a two-day Regional Symposium to Advance State Responses on Domestic Violence that the 2024 judgment exposed systemic inaction that cost a Trinidadian woman her life and should force the region to confront whether its own institutions would respond better under similar circumstances.
The case followed the 2017 murder of Samantha Isaacs by her former partner after years of escalating abuse. Her mother, Tot Lampkin, sued the State after police and judicial authorities repeatedly failed to act on Samantha’s numerous reports of assault, death threats, stalking, harassment and revenge pornography, despite clear evidence of imminent danger and an application for a protection order.
In May 2024, the Trinidadian High Court ruled that the police and magistracy failed to exercise due diligence in the face of obvious warning signs and that the State breached Samantha’s constitutional rights to life, equality before the law and protection of the law. The judge further found that the State violated the family-life rights of Samantha’s son and mother, affirming that governments have a positive constitutional duty to protect victims of gender-based violence from non-state actors whenever risk “is known or ought reasonably to have been known”.
The decision has since been described as a precedent-setting moment for state accountability in the Caribbean.
Marshall said the case would be an important part of discussions among stakeholders on the first day of the symposium, and that Barbados and its neighbours could not pretend the issues exposed in the case were isolated or confined to Trinidad.
“We are looking critically at domestic violence as a regional issue,” he said. “Tomorrow we will be discussing an important legal decision [concerning] Tot Lampkin. We have not had any litigation in Barbados dealing with domestic violence, but in Tot Lampkin a woman repeatedly reported to the police that she was the victim of domestic violence and the responses of the State and the magistracy were not very encouraging. Eventually her partner killed her. The estate then brought the case against the government. She was reporting it, you had enough evidence before you, but you chose not to act, and it ultimately resulted in her death.”
Marshall stressed that the symposium, supported by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank and regional governments, is not intended to be an academic exercise, as there is a need for systemic changes to improve state responses to the growing number of domestic abuse cases being recorded.
“We’re looking at all of the experiences – what has worked in Guyana, what has worked in Trinidad, and what has worked in Jamaica – to see if we can come up with a series of initiatives. Some will be legislative, others more structural, to make sure we can grapple with the issue of domestic violence and begin that long, hard journey of rooting it out.”
He noted that even with reforms, states cannot ignore the risk that violent behaviour may continue despite interventions.
“We have to make sure that as a State we deal with situations where abuse still continues, to offer as much protection as possible to the victims, to their families, and so on.”
Back in March, Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey called for stronger implementation of domestic violence policies, in response to a worrying statistic of more than 1 000 cases of domestic violence reported to the authorities over the past two years.
(SB)
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