The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

LAST week, a man was sentenced by a magistrate to a mere ten months for possession of a nine millimetre pistol, an instrument whose only purpose is to kill or injure human beings. According to police, upon arrest the accused made a statement rationalising his possession of the weapon on the grounds of his need for protection, having stolen $2,000.00 worth of drugs from another drug dealer. So far from minimising his culpability, the explanation contained an admission of another serious criminal offence.

Further, 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.  

Incidentally, the magistrate was free to engage in such obscenely light sentencing because the FNM and PLP governments were both successfully intimidated by her peers into removing and renouncing legislatively imposed minimum sentencing, which apply to firearm offences in almost all of our peer countries, including Britain. That is a matter of despicable shame for both administrations.

This 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.

I am not a practitioner of criminal law, but one thing that all students of common law are familiar with is the doctrine of “common enterprise”, which holds that, if a group sets out to commit an offence (like robbery) and the result is the death of somebody, then the whole group is guilty not only of the intended offence, but also of the consequent homicide. In England, this doctrine has been used to convict a criminal of the “murder” of his co-conspirator, who was actually killed by the intended victim in self-defence. Sadly it seems to be ignored in many of the matters prosecuted in The Bahamas.

Every now and again some genius decides that the appropriate response to rising violent crime is to hold a prayer session, or organise a march, as though the violent offenders would be so touched by either gesture that they would spontaneously change their ways. What nobody seems to focus on is the wanton and reckless manner in which our courts deal with violent offences, both in giving bail and in ensuring that perpetrators of casual violence are back among us with indecent haste.

In fact, it would not surprise me if the very judges themselves who are so clearly complicit in the epidemic of casual violence sweeping The Bahamas were sufficiently immune to irony as to take part in these “soul searching” yet ultimately meaningless demonstrations of distraction.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

January 8, 2016.