HGP Nightly News – A bid by former Assistant Commissioner of Police Calvin Brutus to have his sweeping fraud prosecution thrown out on the grounds of abuse of process has collapsed in court, and the 252 criminal charges he is facing are going nowhere.
Acting Chief Magistrate Faith McGusty dismissed Brutus’s application on Thursday, ruling decisively that the criminal charges before the court are fundamentally different in scope, nature and penalty from the disciplinary charges that were previously determined against him, and that his attempt to conflate the two simply could not stand.
Brutus, who served as Assistant Commissioner of Police for Administration before his dismissal from the Guyana Police Force, was charged in October and November of 2024 with a staggering 252 counts spanning money laundering, fraud and a range of serious related financial crimes. Those charges remain very much alive and active in the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court.
In January of this year, his defence team filed an application seeking to stay certain fraud charges, arguing that the criminal prosecution amounted to an abuse of process because it was built on the very same facts that had already formed the basis of two disciplinary charges brought against Brutus under the Police Discipline Act, charges that had already resulted in his dismissal from the Force.
It was, in essence, an argument that he had already been punished for the same conduct and should not now face criminal prosecution for it as well. The defence contended that putting Brutus through the criminal justice system on the back of facts already litigated in disciplinary proceedings was fundamentally unfair and constituted an improper use of the court’s process.
The prosecution, however, dismantled that argument point by point. Disciplinary proceedings, prosecutors argued, are administrative in nature, internal mechanisms of institutional accountability, while criminal charges are brought in persona, against the State, and carry an entirely different set of consequences.
The two processes are distinct in nature, purpose and consequence, and there is nothing in Guyana’s statutory or constitutional framework that prevents them from operating concurrently or sequentially. The bar for invoking a court’s inherent jurisdiction to stay proceedings for abuse of process is an exceptionally high one, prosecutors stressed, and Brutus had fallen well short of it. No real prejudice, no oppression, no genuine abuse had been established, and the application was, in the prosecution’s words, ill-founded, misconceived and unmeritorious.
The court agreed entirely, dismissing the application and clearing the path for the criminal proceedings to continue. In a further significant development, Magistrate McGusty also ruled on Thursday that two counts of money laundering laid indictable against Brutus and his wife, Adonika Aulder, will proceed via paper committal, meaning the matter is headed toward the higher courts. For Calvin Brutus, the legal road ahead just got considerably longer, and considerably harder.
