is serialising this week (see Pages 18 and 19 of today's paper), is well worth reading in its entirety.

Many people wanted the Commission to focus solely on the bungled investigation and prosecution of the Rebecca Middleton murder case and with good reason; had the case not gone so spectacularly wrong, there would have been no Commission of Inquiry at all.

Leaving that aside for now, there is much of value in the report. The Police take much criticism, but many of the recommendations are sound. What is sad is that many of the recommendations have been made time and again. Surely the Government knows what the problems confronting the Police are by now. The question is: When will the solutions be implemented? Nor is there any dispute over the need for the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), improved bail processing and proper court reporting to which the report devotes a good deal of time and space.

With regard to the prosecution of cases, the Commission is less clear cut.

If the Middleton case was not the central focus of the inquiry, it certainly cast a long shadow over it.

The report does report the investigation and prosecution events is a textbook example of how not to investigate and prosecute a major case.

Yet the pivotal error was the decision to accept Kirk Mundy's version of events and to charge him as an accessory after the fact before all the evidence was in. With hindsight, the prosecution was doomed from then on.

And it is here that the Report, which exposes the inadequacies of the Police time and time again, falls short.

The Commission, rightly, says that it was wrong for lawyer Mark Pettingill, representing Kirk Mundy, to make a proposal for a guilty plea through the Police instead of directly to the prosecuting attorneys.

But it seems to wilfully ignore the fact that Mr. Mottley accepted the proposal.

Whether or not this was a "deal'', as alleged by Mr. Pettingill and others, is irrelevant. Mundy could not be tried for a more serious offence afterwards even when the evidence proved he was a liar.

Then Mr. Mottley, his own chambers' "finest resource'' who had, according to the Commission, the "intellectual capacity and resourcefulness to overcome the flimsy obstacle that lay in the way of his appearing in person'', failed to prosecute and shortly after the Crown presented its case, returned home to Barbados.

That is it for the Commissioners' criticism of Mr. Mottley's failure to prosecute the case.

The Commission's conclusion that Mr. Calhoun's absence was `insubordinate' for not assisting Solicitor General William Pearce in the prosecution of Justis Smith lacks obvious logic because the Commissioners already concede, in the same paragraph of the report, that he had been `excused' by Mr. Pearce, not that he refused Mr. Pearce.

It is strange that Mr. Mottley, and to a lesser extent, Khamisi Tokunbo, who were the prosecutors present when the Mundy plea was accepted, are not criticised -- even for the decision to allow Mundy to plead to the lesser charge.

This is a strange failure in a report which is otherwise forthright in exposing the failures and inadequacies of the Police and Crown prosecutors.

It is not perfect, but it does contain many valuable recommendations for the future. Some of them have been made before, as the Commission admits. It is to be hoped that this time they will be acted upon. Then, at least, something good will come out of the tragedy of the Rebecca Middleton case.