The Tribune

By NICO SCAVELLA

URBAN Renewal Co-chair Cynthia “Mother” Pratt said yesterday that the government needs to pass “draconian laws” in order to effectively combat the incidents of violent crime and murder that plague the country.

Mrs Pratt, who served as minister of national security in the first Christie administration, said that with the number of murders steadily mounting the government has no choice but to introduce harsher laws to curb the violence.

However, Mrs Pratt also rejected assertions that Urban Renewal, the government’s highly touted social intervention plan, has failed. She said crime would be much worse if the programme was not around.

“Some things take Draconian measures,” she told The Tribune on the sidelines of an Urban Renewal Commission Back to School event. “Your people will cry out. They’ll cry out when the murders increase. When you take Draconian measures they’ll cry out again, but you have to do what you have to do if it’s to bring safety to all of us.”

However, Mrs Pratt did not elaborate on the stiff measures that she thinks needs to be introduced.

(Draco was the first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece in the 7th century BC. He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a court. His laws demanded a very strict code of conduct and unusually severe or cruel forms of punishment – death included – for both trivial and serious crimes. Since then, the term “Draconian” has been used to describe repressive legal measures).

Capital punishment is still an applicable punishment for murder in the Bahamas, however, no one has been executed since January 6, 2000 when David Mitchell was hanged.

The London-based Privy Council declared in 2006 that the country’s mandatory death penalty upon a murder conviction was unconstitutional, prompting the government to specify in 2011 which categories of murders are “the worst of the worst” and therefore warrant the sentence of death.

Crown prosecutors last year sought the death penalty for six men in four separate murder cases.

Last year, Kofhe Goodman was sentenced to death for the murder of 11-year-old Marco Archer.

“I know the prime minister wants to do a number of things, but his hands are tied,” Mrs Pratt added. “I don’t want to discuss the political side in it because he has to go through many things to get some things changed, but I know he would like very much to put down some Draconian measures.”

Mrs Pratt also said that Urban Renewal is still an effective way to combat crime going forward, and dismissed the notion that the organisation’s efforts are “dwarfed” or “counterproductive”.

“The question is: ‘What if Urban Renewal wasn’t here?’” she asked. “If we don’t do this, stop and think how much more crime we would have. The thousand that are in the band, those that we are helping off the streets right now, what would happen to them? Where would they be? So we have to look at what we are doing to prevent them from becoming criminals, because if we had these things before, we might not have been to this point.

“Many of those men who are criminals today were little boys. Now today, we’re talking about preventing these ones from becoming worse, because they are coming up. If they live in a house with a criminally-minded big brother, he’s going to feed it into them, and you’ll have another generation. So that’s what we need to talk about.”

Up to press time, the country had recorded 84 murders for the year, according to The Tribune’s records.