The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Last week, a young man convicted of possession of an illegal firearm and ammunition received a sentence of one year in prison and a fine of $5,500.00. This kind of thing has become so normalised in The Bahamas that it hardly receives any notice, either editorially or by government ministers charged with maintaining societal norms.

But it is not normal.

Let’s look at the Cayman Islands, by contrast.

Last August, in an extremely controversial case, Justice Marva McDonald-Bishop sentenced a man to just over eight years in prison for simple possession (the firearm wasn’t actually illegal, it was just unlicensed).

In doing so, she justified departing with the territory’s statutory ten-year minimum sentence on the grounds of extraordinary circumstances. But the lightness of the sentence was nonetheless considered controversial.

The Cayman Islands had a murder rate of 8 per 100,000 people in 2021. We had 31 per 100,000, most of them involving illegal firearms.

In this context, a custodial sentence of a mere one year for possession of an illegal firearm is simply outrageous.

Further, the imposition of fines for serious crimes arguably invites further criminal behaviour. Where are repeat criminal offenders expected to find thousands of dollars to pay court fines? Think a little.

This total absence of common sense among our judiciary is so commonplace that it is the leading immediate cause of our stubbornly high rates of violent crime. Our criminal courts have become revolving doors of bailed and lightly sentenced violent offenders. Yet somehow politicians fail to do anything to address it, in stark contrast to better run societies.

At present, the revolving doors tend to magnify the level of criminality caused by what is still a relatively small number of repeat offenders in a largely law-abiding society.

But we are fast approaching the point where the failure of politicians to control a reckless judiciary using statutory minimum sentencing and restrictive bail legislation will result in a criminal culture so rampant and pervasive that these tools will not be sufficient, even when politicians wake up to the need to use them.

If you don’t believe me, look at Jamaica. There the present government has enacted a series of Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs), in which whole parishes are effectively subjected to martial law, with curfews and shoot-on-sight orders. But it is still losing the battle against crime in once-peaceful areas like Montego Bay and Westmoreland.

That is what happens when criminality goes from being a few bad apples released over and over again to a general culture of lawless violence - which our judges are busy normalising with their casual treatment of illegal gun possession.

The clock is ticking, our judiciary is failing us miserably, and politicians appear to be either indifferent or too timid to act.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

February 6, 2022.