fp Turks and Caicos

The 2011 convictions of two men for illegal sand mining have been quashed on appeal in the Turks and Caicos Islands Supreme Court.

St. Martin Valmera had been ordered to pay $20,000 or serve 60 days, and Duverna Louis Rigby to pay $4,000 or serve three months for filling a pickup truck with sand near North West Point Resort.

According to the March 5 decision by Justice Margaret Ramsay-Hale, Rigby said he had been working on a project in 1997 in which he had dug sand and put it several hundred yards from the beach to be used in the project.

In 2010, he got permission from the property owner to use some of that sand to repair a public road in Five Cays, but he did not have a sand mining license. Officers from the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources arrested Rigby and Valmera while they were taking the sand Feb. 10, 2010.

The justice overturned the conviction because the Coastal Protection Ordinance did not clearly define “land bordering on the sea.”

“Giving the words of the ordinance their ordinary meaning, and bearing in mind the apparent mischief of preventing illegal sand mining to protect and preserve beaches and guard against shoreline erosion, I construe the words ‘land bordering on the sea’ as referring to that margin of land adjacent to the sea, the seashore, the beach, extending from the low water mark to the vegetation line,” Ramsay-Hale wrote.

“If the legislature had intended the word ‘coast’ to have a wider definition to include land at some distance from the beach, it could easily have used such words as ‘including all coastal land above and within x yards of the mean high water mark’ or words to that effect. Absent those words, the provision should bear the narrower construction I have put on it, not least because it is a penal statute which creates an offence of strict liability.”

Click here to read the decision in the case