The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Bahamian Judges and Magistrates would do well to read international and regional media reports on trial and sentencing practices in other common law jurisdictions.

If they permitted themselves to be guided by the principles applied by some neighbouring colleagues, the rate of violent crime among individuals awaiting trial would plummet.

Last Tuesday’s Barbados Today online newspaper reports that, in a “surprise move”, a local magistrate granted bail to two 17-year-old juveniles for setting alight a cane field, which led to a local bushfire.

In granting bail, the magistrate stated her view “that the conditions being attached to the bail should make them wish they were remanded to prison instead”.

In the event, she imposed a 6am to 6pm curfew with strict reporting requirements and issued a stern warning not to offend while on bail.

She also rebuked one defence counsel’s claim that his client had never committed a crime with the qualification “you mean he has never been caught”. Both accused were students from good families and no prior convictions.

By comparison, here in the Bahamas, over the holiday weekend, a man on bail for not one, not two but three murders (four if you include the infant inside the pregnant woman slain) was arrested while on bail for allegedly terrorising and robbing a member of the public with a firearm.

The event took place around 3am on a Sunday morning, which suggests that the Judge or Magistrate that released him among us did not even take the precaution that the Barbadian Magistrate did with two mischievous juveniles and impose a strict curfew.

Something is awfully, dreadfully wrong with the judicial culture of the Bahamas and it is contributing to the normalisation of an intolerable level of violence.

I for one am not intimidated by the bristling of judges to such criticism and no thinking Bahamian should be. The judiciary and its astonishingly liberal approach to bail is directly responsible for the level of violent crime in The Bahamas today. Full stop.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

April 24, 2014.