The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Bar Association president Kahlil Parker anticipates that procedures for admission to the prison will be “more robustly scrutinised” after a woman was sentenced for using a fake lawyer’s ID to smuggle drugs into the facility.

“In the immediate aftermath, I do anticipate that the procedure for admission to the prison will be more robustly scrutinised and as an association, we will be reaching out to the prison to make sure that they have as much support from us as possible to verify the identity of persons presenting themselves as attorneys,” he said during a recent interview.

“Well, what we will do is make available a list of our members and when in doubt we will give them an example of our ID. The ID used in this instance is not a very good example or a very good copy of our actual official ID. So we’ll make sure that they know what an official ID looks like and that they can cross reference in the face of suspicious documentation and we will encourage our members all of them to have current IDs and proceed from there.”

Although this is not the first time someone has pretended to be an attorney, Mr Parker said this is the first instance that he is aware of a person presenting a forged or a mockup of the ID.

“We are still investigating the circumstances surrounding how she purported to have secured that ID to make sure there are not any vulnerabilities that we can plug with other IDs. This ID was not produced in the way that our actual IDs are produced...so we want to know if there’s a vendor producing fraudulent IDs so we can put a stop to that,” he explained.

The woman in question was sentenced to 15 months this week after admitting to the offence.