Court Management Services Response Weak And Demonstrative Of Deeper Scars.

The Court Management Service (CMS) has respond­ed with a weak response to what is a detailed doc­u­ment from senior police inves­ti­ga­tors which high­lights the total­ly inad­e­quate sen­tences they mete out for seri­ous gun offens­es. Police Investigators have point­ed to a litany of cas­es, to include one in which Justice Bertram Morrison imposed total fines of $170,000 on a man con­vict­ed for ille­gal pos­ses­sion of firearm and ammu­ni­tion and a fine of $70,000 on a man con­vict­ed for pos­ses­sion of ammunition.

light sen­tences in cas­es of ille­gal pos­ses­sion of firearms and ammu­ni­tion, in which an American woman who was admon­ished and dis­charged by Justice David Fraser the woman was an American tourist who plead­ed guilty to pos­ses­sion of ammunition.
Police doc­u­ment report­ed that she was con­vict­ed of ille­gal pos­ses­sion of firearm and ammunition.

But these instances are a mere drop in the buck­et, the real harm the courts are doing is large as it relates to bail. The astro­nom­i­cal num­ber of Jamaicans killed by arrest­ed mur­der­ers who are sum­mar­i­ly grant­ed bail far exceeds those who are con­vict­ed and giv­en light sentences.
Killing com­plainants and oth­er pros­e­cu­tion wit­ness­es has been a strate­gic approach of the Island’s killers, police have com­plained about this for decades but those cries have fall­en on deaf ears.
No one in Jamaica seems con­cerned about the avalanche of blood­shed except the police of course.

The CMS argued that the woman was held at the air­port at the end of her vaca­tion with her moth­er and imme­di­ate­ly informed author­i­ties that the firearm mag­a­zine dis­cov­ered belonged to her hus­band, who is a licensed firearm hold­er in the United States.“Despite her tech­ni­cal guilt, there was no evi­dence of a delib­er­ate or will­ful inten­tion to breach our laws, and no one with­in the bor­ders of Jamaica was placed at any risk by the inad­ver­tent com­mis­sion of the offense,” the agency not­ed. CMS said the “young moth­er of four small chil­dren” had very lit­tle mon­ey left to pay “even a nom­i­nal fine” and was “vis­i­bly dis­traught and utter­ly dev­as­tat­ed..” “She would not be allowed to leave the island if she had an unpaid fine. It was Friday It was in those whol­ly excep­tion­al cir­cum­stances that the sen­tence of admon­ished and dis­charged was deemed appropriate.”

This pub­li­ca­tion asks what about the case of thir­ty-six-year-old Michael Abrahams, who was found with cocaine with a street val­ue of more than $90 mil­lion dol­lars at a house he occu­pied at Caribbean Estate in Portmore, St Catherine on July 7^th.
Abrahams plead guilty. In exchange for his guilty plea, he received a fine of JMD $500,000 or the serv­ing 6 months in prison. On his sec­ond count of the crime, Abrahams struck a plea deal with the court for Dealing in Cocaine and received 9 months hard labor, which will be sus­pend­ed for two years. He was also grant­ed bail for JMD $300,00.

This is a graph­ic indi­ca­tor of the clear and present dan­ger in which the courts have placed our coun­try. It exem­pli­fies the very rea­son I have per­son­al­ly called for manda­to­ry min­i­mum sen­tences for cer­tain cat­e­gories of crime.
The sup­posed mis­con­duct of Police, Military and Corrections offi­cials gave the coun­try INDECOM. Despite the mount­ing pile of evi­dence and empir­i­cal data against the courts and the legal fra­ter­ni­ty, the Legislature has not lift­ed a fin­ger to stop the abuse of pow­er. [Good of the police to now com­pile data to show what we have been say­ing for decades].

Jamaica is the coun­try with the most depor­tees in the Caribbean, there is a rea­son for it.
American courts do not make accom­mo­da­tions for peo­ple who break their laws, regard­less of the mit­i­gat­ing circumstances.
That is the rea­son so many Jamaicans have been deport­ed back to the Island despite some of the very same mit­i­gat­ing cir­cum­stances of which CMS referenced.
In many cas­es, some of the peo­ple deport­ed by the United States have not com­mit­ted any offens­es but were caught up in police drag­nets which incrim­i­nat­ed them effec­tive­ly ruin­ing their lives.

These Judges who sup­plant the laws with their own weak­ness­es and bias­es are woe­ful­ly mis­guid­ed and delu­sion­al if they believe that a jus­tice sys­tem can be oper­at­ed that way. And that is premised on whether we believe their expla­na­tion instead of ascrib­ing more sin­is­ter motives behind their actions.
This is why the leg­is­la­ture must stop bang­ing on desks in the house and hurl­ing insults at each oth­er and change the laws, effec­tive­ly remov­ing from these judges the dis­cre­tion to turn the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem into a revolv­ing door.

We can ill-afford to have these unin­formed, unex­posed lit­tle over­lords in their sil­ly lit­tle robes define and deter­mine the kind of coun­try we have going for­ward. Judges are sup­posed to fol­low the laws, not sup­plant them with their own feelings.
The direc­tion of the coun­try must come out of the nation’s parliament.