The Tribune

THIS COUNTRY is being suffocated by crime. When you open your Tribune today, you will be confronted by a front page that will make your blood run cold – “Pastor beaten and family terrorised”; “Missing policeman’s body found in Grand Bahama”; “Police officer accused of sex attacks on minors” and “Jet ski rape alert came after repeated complaint by US Embassy ignored”.

No wonder Tall Pines Leslie Miller wondered what world the Chief Justice lives in when he remarked that the death penalty in The Bahamas is “virtually dead”.

Mr Miller was reacting to the statement made on Wednesday by Chief Justice Sir Hartman Longley on the opening of the new year’s criminal assizes. It would take a massacre comparable to the January 7 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris before the death penalty would be imposed in the Bahamas “under the present system”, the Chief Justice had said. The last hanging to take place in The Bahamas was in January 2000.

Last year ended with 149 murders — a record for a once peaceful Bahamas, with murders continuing into the new year.

We can understand Mr Miller’s angry reaction. His only son, Mario, was murdered 13 years ago and no one was ever brought to justice. In the House of Assembly on August 13, 2013, Mr Miller named the hit man who had ordered his son’s murder 11 years earlier. The man named was never brought to justice. It would be fair to say that the case was bungled. It was also suggested that one of the perpetrators had special protection.

“People don’t know the sadness, the bitterness, the loneliness that parents go through. The system is clogged up in every respect, in all cases. Be it civil or criminal. The system is simply clogged up. To many of us justice delayed is justice denied, “ Mr Miller had told the House.

And although the politicians like to hide behind the Commissioner of Police and accuse him of not getting crime under control, the courts cannot escape the major blame. After all what more can the Commissioner do — his officers take the accused to the Bar of the Court and a sympathetic judge is lenient on sentencing. Under judicial criticism legislators removed the mandatory minimum sentence for such offences as gun possession giving the courts the right of discretion. For the situation now confronting us that discretion is not being handled wisely. So when blame is being passed around, no one can duck the bullet — they are all to blame.

In a letter to The Tribune on January 12, lawyer Andrew Allen pointed out the problem created by the courts in handing down sentences that justify stiffer penalties.

He told of the case of the magistrate who sentenced a man to a mere ten months for possession of a nine millimetre pistol, despite the fact that the accused confessed that he was carrying the pistol for his own protection because he had stolen $2,000 worth of drugs from another drug dealer.

“Further,” said Mr Allen, “as far as the reports indicate, the accused did not tell the police where he got the firearm, nor did he identify the supposedly dangerous drug dealer whom he feared – both matters of deep public interest to a terror-stricken community. Yet the magistrate saw fit to schedule the release of this clearly dangerous criminal among the Bahamian public before this present year expires…”

“This ,” continued Mr Allen, “was not a lone act of judicial lunacy. It is part of a contemptible pattern. The first murder victim of 2016 was a man who, in 2009, was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for an armed robbery. During the course of the robbery, a security guard was shot dead and a man who just happened to be in the area was shot twice in the head so that the robbers could use his car in their getaway.

“Press reports did not state the length of his imprisonment, but what is clear is that, by 2015, he was out and free living among the Bahamian public. Given the nature of his death, it also seems clear that he was back in the same criminal subculture, after a brief stint in Her Majesty’s dehumanising hellhole.”

What is obvious in this case is that if this man had received the severe sentence that his 2009 criminal enterprise warranted he would have been safely behind prison bars and not lying in the morgue as he is today.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Allyson Maynard Gibson urged the judiciary to be more hesitant to grant bail in cases of murder and other serious offences. Rather than being urged, this should be legislated.

When we started our journalistic career in the courts many years ago, bail for a person accused of murder was unheard of.

We can understand the desire of Mr Miller and others like him who want to “hang them high.” At one time we probably would have been in their camp, but we have heard of too many mistakes having been made in capital punishment cases to support the final solution. Too often the noose has gone around the wrong neck, or the wrong victim has been strapped to the electric chair. The death penalty is final — it can’t be reversed.

That is why we support draconian penalties, rather than death by hanging. In other words if a person is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, life should mean life, and not 25 years for good behaviour. The only way to get out would be if the law later found that it had locked up the wrong person.

Of course, the escalation of crime in The Bahamas today is that the prison will soon reach saturation point — if it has not already done so. This will then force the magistrates to lessen the penalties to relieve the prison’s overcrowding.

However, when so many of a country’s able bodied citizens are locked up in a penitentiary their upkeep becomes a financial burden on the state.

This is why we have advocated that a large tract of land — preferably on a Family Island — be set aside for a prison for those serving long sentences.

They should till the soil and feed the nation. In other words they would work to repay society for their crimes instead of being a state burden.

Those who have other skills — for example carpentry – should be encouraged to make items such as furniture, toys and the like, for sale.

Those sentenced for life would have life-time employment to atone for their sins. Those with long sentences, but who have hope of returning to society, should leave with a skill that would enable them to support themselves. They could also be given a stipend that would be saved from their labour while in prison to help them get established without using crime as their crutch.

However, whatever is decided, the year 2016 cannot be a repeat of 2015.