A Clean Unbiased And Honest Judiciary Central To The Rule Of Law In A Democratic Society…

There is a ten­den­cy with­in the jus­tice sys­tem to have strength only for the poor­est and least pow­er­ful Jamaicans. If you are a poor man who can­not feed your fam­i­ly, be advised that your deci­sion to steal some ack­ees from mas Joe’s tree will land you in prison if you are caught steal­ing them.
On the oth­er hand, if you are a polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed lawyer, a man can be stabbed repeat­ed­ly and shot in your home in which there was no oth­er per­son but your­self, no one broke into the house, and you will nev­er see the inside of a jail cell.
A young man who grabs a neck­lace and runs away is at greater risk of going to prison if caught than a politi­cian who alleges that he left his reg­is­tered firearm in his car, for­got or omit­ted to lock the vehi­cle, then dis­cov­ers that the weapon was gone and failed to noti­fy the police until he was ready to do so.….… the next day.

For the sys­tem to work, every Jamaican must have buy-in, mean­ing every Jamaican, regard­less of means, must have a brief that the sys­tem is there to pro­tect them. When those of less means har­bor the belief that the sys­tem only works for those at the top, they rebel. They do as they please; when the mass­es are in a state of dis­con­tent, the upper class is not in a safe place.
It is past time for the sys­tem to self-cor­rect. Jamaica needs to move expe­di­tious­ly from the present sys­tem of man to a sys­tem of laws. We need a new con­sti­tu­tion writ­ten by Jamaican aca­d­e­mics. We need a police depart­ment that is pro­fes­sion­al and delib­er­a­tive. A com­pe­tent pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al body and a less cor­rupt judi­cia­ry that is less inclined to work on behalf of vio­lent murderers.
Some have chas­tised me for repeat­ed­ly char­ac­ter­iz­ing the Jamaican judi­cia­ry as ‘cor­rupt.’ Their under­stand­ing of the term cor­rupt in this con­text is lim­it­ed to only tak­ing bribes. Yet, no one should be delu­sion­al about whether judges have tak­en mon­ey from defense lawyers to aid their clients. Even with that knowl­edge, some Jamaicans would rather pre­tend this dynam­ic does not exist rather than face the facts.
The term cor­rup­tion with­in the con­text of the judi­cia­ry is not con­fined to tak­ing bribes but extends further.
Transparency International, a world-renowned watch­dog agency, asserts ’ judi­cial cor­rup­tion fuels impuni­ty and cor­rodes the rule of law.’
Equal treat­ment before the law is a pil­lar of demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties. ‘When courts are cor­rupt­ed by greed or polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy, the scales of jus­tice are tipped, and ordi­nary peo­ple suffer.’

Nowhere is this more self-evi­dent than right here in Jamaica, where at the very top of the judi­cial branch of gov­ern­ment, there appears to be cor­rup­tion, one that results in the inex­plic­a­ble minor tech­ni­cal­i­ties and inane argu­ments that are used to jus­ti­fy the release of vio­lent repeat mur­der­ers and gang­sters back onto to the streets.
Worse yet, this comes against the back­ground of a judi­cia­ry with no con­se­quen­tial over­sight that ensures fideli­ty to pro­to­col and adher­ence to prin­ci­ples and propriety.
To the extent that the judi­cia­ry is held to any stan­dard of pro­to­col and pro­pri­ety, they are self-polic­ing and, there­fore, answer­able to no one but themselves…
One of the main dri­vers of crime is the belief among a large seg­ment of soci­ety that the sys­tem does not work for them. Therefore they are pre­pared to do as they please and live with the consequences.
The sad real­i­ty is that while they are pre­pared to live with the con­se­quences, the rest of soci­ety is dying from their actions.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer police detec­tive, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog Mikebeckles​.com.