The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

Ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

ATAIN Takitota, who was awarded more than $1m for being unlawfully detained in prison for eight years, the largest sum of its kind in The Bahamas, died last month at the Princess Margaret Hospital.

His obituary in local newspapers said he died “peacefully” at 59.

His case was often used as a benchmark for those seeking damages for poor treatment.

 Mr Takitota arrived in the country from Japan on August 1992 with permission to remain for a week.

 That month, after losing all of his money and documentation, he was arrested on Paradise Island for vagrancy. He was detained at the Fox Hill prison until October 2000 without being charged or tried.

 He eventually testified that he had been in a traffic accident a year before leaving Japan and suffered head injuries which continued to affect him.

 The medical staff at Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre concluded that he suffered from retrograde amnesia.

 While in prison, he attempted suicide, first by going on a hunger strike in 1997, then by slashing his wrists twice on successive days in 1998. After he was treated at Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre, he was returned to prison.

 The Privy Council later described the conditions he endured as “simply appalling”.

 “The plaintiff was made to sleep on a ‘filthy floor’ with a blanket,” the Privy Council wrote.

 “Conditions were hot and steamy in the summer. There was a bad mosquito problem. The plaintiff testified that sometimes he was so hot that he had to put water on the floor and lay in it. There was no running water in the facility. The plaintiff was obliged to urinate and defecate in a bucket.”

 “He said the stench was such that it made him vomit on countless occasions causing him to lose his appetite. There were four buckets of urine and faeces in an 18 by eight-foot room filled with twenty to thirty-five people at any given time.”

 Once released, Mr Takitota successfully sued the government but was initially awarded only $1,000 for his unlawful detention.

 The Court of Appeal raised his award to $500k.

 The Privy Council determined in 2009 that this was insufficient, and ordered the Court of Appeal to increase the amount to reflect his eight years in prison and the suffering and damage that was caused.