No greater task may be given any man than to bring the killer of the innocent to justice.
That was what motivated me to strive to be a good detective. That was a motivational theme on my CIB course. As profound as that theme was it came after I decided to become a police officer.
I took the police plunge because I believed fundamentally in the idea of good over evil. Standing up to bullies. That crimes ought to be punished.
I still believe now as I did then, that citizens have a right to be secure in their persons from personal assault and death . I also believe that a person’s property is their own, and should remain so until they decide to divest themselves of said property.
In essence I am totally opposed to criminal conduct of any kind.
Except speeding…cough, cough,(smile).
Losing a loved one is excruciatingly painful, I can only imagine how devastating it must be for family members of victims of violent criminal actions.
Having lost my own child , (albeit not through violent means) , I am particularly sensitive to those who have lost loved ones.
More than anything else , I am incredibly empathetic to the families who have lost loved ones as a result of violent crimes .
As a result I always felt that those who take the lives of the innocent should be held accountable for their crimes .
What that accountability looks like is the prerogative of the state.
Since Governments have taken it upon themselves to be arbiter in these matters of justice/vengeance, it is important that it does what it says it will do and deliver justice to those so aggrieved.
To hear the testimony of family members who manage to survive violent crimes, even as their loved ones are not so lucky, is to understand the heart rending pain they feel.
“It is a pain which does not dissipate, you simply try to survive it” one woman said to me once.
This makes it more critical that our police officers are empowered with all the tools they need to go after murderers.
That prosecutors understand the critical nature of their responsibilities in seeking justice on behalf of those whom have been victimized.
It is important that judges understand that as triers of fact they hold immense power. They get to determine whether a trial proceeds even though a case may not be airtight.
They should never allow a case to simply be tossed on some technicality as if the victim is unworthy of respect.
Like surviving family members are collateral damage of a sick society to be discarded on the dump heap of” oh well we tried”.
Finally it should be outside the remit of any government , much less a single politician to determine that murder cases should be tossed from court dockets so that those dockets may be freed up.
Several years ago I had a back and forth with a Jamaican defense attorney on a social media platform. She was offended that I wrote about the fact that Lawyers are a huge part of the reason cases cannot come to a conclusion in the Jamaican criminal justice system.
She pointed me to a survey done by none other than some of her cohorts at the you guessed it..
The University of the West Indies (the intellectual ghetto) which said that cases are adjourned largely as a result of prosecutors asking for more time not defense counsels.
Sure I’m about to accept a survey from a liberal bastion of socialist gobbledygook. One which trains the very same lawyers, and which is basically the personification of liberal thought.
Liberal thought which has poisoned our culture, turning our country into a cesspool of criminal sanctuary .
The fact of the matter is that lawyers who are unpaid for their services was the number one reason cases got stuck in the system.
Does that mean that police and prosecutors are not tardy as well ?
Hell no !!!
However as time progressed defense lawyers asking for adjournments so that they can be paid accomplished the results mounting a successful defense would.
Dragging out cases was resulting in dismissals ‚including murder cases. Why risk going to trail if simply asking for adjournment after adjournment was going to be granted and the defendant eventually set free?
The strategy of simply asking for adjournments as a defense strategy was born.
It is a strategy which feeds on itself, the more adjournments in the system the more jammed the bottleneck becomes, the more chaotic it becomes.
The more difficult it is to get justice through the courts.
The more difficult it is to get justice through the courts the more crime increases because criminals are emboldened into believing that they will never be held to account for their crimes.
Throw another hurdle in the way of the police (indecom) and crime skyrockets out of control.
Delroy Chuck the Island’s justice Minister wants cases over 5 years old to be tossed from the court dockets.(Including capital murder cases)
This is the quality of the leadership which actively enables crime on the Island.
This is the reason it is so offensive, the proposal of Delroy Chuck that courts should simply throw out cases that has not been concluded in five years.
Yes that includes murder cases.
Chuck is Jamaica’s Minister of Justice, he singularly made the proposal which he hopes will in his mind, clear up the court dockets. At least that’s what he says.
On closer scrutiny,if this hair-brain scheme is allowed to become policy it would be a watershed moment for the rule of law in the country.
It would not only see numerous mass-murderers freed on the say-so of a single individual without having to answer for their crimes.
But more than that it would be a defining moment for the administration of justice on the Island . One which would see stalling as a defense strategy enshrined in our culture if not in actual law.
These are the kinds of actions being proposed and taken in their supposed fight against crime. The (indecom) act being another such instance.
None of these proposals will do anything to improve the criminal justice system, conversely they are assured to make a really bad situation even more critical.
This is what happens when you have system where a single individual, without debate or consensus can make decisions and those decisions are allowed to change an entire country.
The impact is even more devastating when the person making the proposal has zero interest in actually reducing crime but have their own personal agendas.