Thousands Of Murderers Won’t Even Be Arrested …

Ever so often we see inci­dents of alleged mur­der­ers walk­ing out of court­rooms released by a judge.
I for one crit­i­cize judges when they sup­plant the law with their own lib­er­al views and turn dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals back onto the streets.
On the oth­er hand, Judges can­not be fault­ed when defense attor­neys make no-case sub­mis­sions on behalf of their clients.
They have no recourse but to oblige, because pros­e­cu­tors do not pro­vide the court with evi­dence enough to force defen­dants to answer the charges against them.

Many Cops Given Up On Ending Murders/​Pols Stand In The Way Of Real Fight…

It is almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble that in so many instances, it is the pros­e­cu­tors who are telling the court that they do not have enough evi­dence to pro­ceed.
How is it pos­si­ble that a case can be before the court and Investigators do not have the evi­dence to sup­port the charge/​s against the accused/​s, at least in order for the case to be tried before a jury?
We wrote about this recent­ly because almost dai­ly we see reports of this hap­pen­ing. This means that although only a small amount of actu­al mur­der­ers are ever arrest­ed we are wit­ness­ing an even small­er per­cent­age of those arrest­ed being con­vict­ed for their crimes.
These are exact­ly the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a fail­ing soci­ety. When crim­i­nals are not being held account­able, cit­i­zens lose faith in the sys­tem.
The result is chaos, we are wit­ness­ing that law­less chaos today.

Bryan Sykes Barking Up The Wrong Tree…

Take for instance the mur­der case against 38-year-old Audley Duvall, who the police said was one of Jamaica’s most want­ed crim­i­nals in 2017.
Duvall was set free by a Judge of the high court when the pros­e­cu­tion admit­ted it could not pro­ceed for want of evi­dence.
Duval and anoth­er man were accused of the shoot­ing death of Craig Grey on August 16, 2016, at his farm in Coolie dis­trict in Bog Walk, St Catherine. The wit­ness in the case report­ed­ly gave evi­dence that the men wore masks and as such he was unable to see their faces.
He sub­se­quent­ly tes­ti­fied that he saw the faces of the accused and that he pre­vi­ous­ly denied see­ing his face because he was afraid. He also report­ed­ly tes­ti­fied that he was able to see his face because of light from a pig­pen. This was report­ed­ly con­tra­dict­ed by pho­tos from the crime scene and the evi­dence of the scene of the crime inves­ti­ga­tor who tes­ti­fied that he did not see a light in the pig­pen.
At the end of the prosecution’s case, the judge agreed with the defense that the wit­ness’ evi­dence was unre­li­able and instruct­ed the jury to return a for­mal ver­dict of not guilty. (Gleaner reporting)

If this accused was a seri­ous threat as the police said he was pri­or to his arrest, how could they not do all in their pow­ers to ensure this guy paid for his crimes?
Without point­ing fin­gers, I am forced to won­der whether the inves­ti­gat­ing officer/​s did all they could in this instance or did he/​she sim­ply decid­ed to go with the sin­gle eye-wit­ness’s state­ment?
There are sev­er­al rea­sons not to depend on eye-wit­ness state­ments alone, not the least of which is that a skilled defense attor­ney can always poke holes in that wit­ness­es’ tes­ti­mo­ny at tri­al.
Secondly, in high crime geo­gra­phies like Jamaica, wit­ness­es are eas­i­ly threat­ened, or oth­er­wise tam­pered with, (being paid off for exam­ple).
With the length of time that elaps­es between when a defen­dant is arrest­ed and brought to tri­al, eye­wit­ness accounts are eas­i­ly dis­cred­it­ed by a com­pe­tent defense attor­ney.
Witnesses leave the coun­try, they receive pay­offs, they are threat­ened and even killed.
Combined, the case for not depend­ing on a sin­gle eye­wit­ness account is rather com­pelling.
But it seems to me at least, that once a wit­ness turns up and gives a state­ment, inves­ti­ga­tors and pros­e­cu­tors are ecsta­t­ic and they do noth­ing more.

Which brings us to the def­i­n­i­tion of [Murder].….…..(“the unlaw­ful pre­med­i­tat­ed killing of one human being by anoth­er”).
Other def­i­n­i­tions say with mal­ice [afore­though]. The term ‘pre­med­i­tat­ed’, con­sti­tutes and cov­ers the ele­ment of mal­ice in mur­der.
So what is the rea­son for out­lin­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of mur­der? The answer is sim­ple.
If an inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer has evi­dence iden­ti­fy­ing a killer, there is a strong like­li­hood that if the offi­cer digs a lit­tle deep­er he will find a motive for the killing.
Once a motive is devel­oped, it becomes eas­i­er to deter­mine why the killing may have been planned [pre­med­i­tat­ed] [mali­cious], stitch­ing that evi­dence togeth­er some­times opens up new streams of evi­dence as well. Leading to more state­ments from oth­er wit­ness­es (eg) a wit­ness may attest to hear­ing the defen­dant say he was going to kill the dece­dent.
There may also be doc­u­men­tary evi­dence, a let­ter, streams of text mes­sages or voice mes­sages, between the defen­dant and decedent. 

The defen­dan­t’s where­abouts at the time of the mur­der are also cru­cial. Ask him to give an ali­bi for his where­abouts at the time the dece­dent was mur­dered.
Then test the ali­bi.
If he lies about the ali­bi he is lying about every­thing else.
Doing the tough unsexy work involved in crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions may not always prove guilt beyond a rea­son­able doubt, but the [cir­cum­stan­tial] nature of the sec­ondary evi­dence devel­oped around the eye­wit­ness’s sto­ry may very well be enough to get the case to tri­al.
In today’s world in which busi­ness­es and house­holds have secu­ri­ty cam­eras, it is worth can­vass­ing an area with a view to find­ing out whether a secu­ri­ty sys­tem may have cap­tured some­thing a per­son may have missed. It is well worth the effort. 

It is for this rea­son that I have chal­lenged the JCF, and my beloved CIB to learn from oth­er coun­tries, assign teams of two or more detec­tives to run­down leads and work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly and swift­ly on cas­es to ensure that cas­es are inves­ti­gat­ed the right way.
A sim­ple thing like a cig­a­rette butt is some­times a crit­i­cal bit of evi­dence, as a defen­dant may have been smok­ing at the scene of the crime and left that tiny bit of evi­dence there.
A killer may have walked into a bar and ordered a dring before killing some­one. He walks out and every­one who was in that bar says they have nev­er seen that per­son before.
The police come and do their inves­ti­ga­tions, col­lects state­ments, none of which means any­thing unless the assailant is caught and the wit­ness can be brought into an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion parade to iden­ti­fy the assailant.
But nobody remem­bers that the killer ordered a Guinness or a Heineken, or may even have ordered a drink in a glass.
So all of the bot­tles are gath­ered and placed with oth­er emp­ties and the glass­es are washed, and away goes all of the valu­able DNA evi­dence from that shoot­er drink­ing from that con­tain­er.
There is no statute of lim­i­ta­tions on mur­der,(mur­der is a vio­la­tion of com­mon law), so as long as that DNA evi­dence is stored in a data­base, there is a chance that he will even­tu­al­ly be brought to justice.

Nowadays with DNA test­ing, those bits of evi­dence may be enough to ensure that a mur­der­er does not walk free.
We know that despite offi­cers and pros­e­cu­tor best efforts killers stand a chance of being released if not on bail they are released for want of enough pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al evi­dence.
Even when they have been con­vict­ed the court of appeals is incred­i­bly lenient in find­ing a tech­ni­cal­i­ty to return them to the streets.
The prin­ci­ple of prece­dent, (Stare deci­sis) let the deci­sion stand, is one that seems lost on Jamaican jurists.
I know that it is an uphill fight when the Government refus­es to give offi­cers the tools they need, and refus­es to pro­tect the coun­try with sen­tences that ensure that for vio­lent crimes, crim­i­nals are not returned to the streets.
That would include remov­ing from judges the dis­cre­tion to allow dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals to walk with a slap on the wrist.
But with this admin­is­tra­tion that will not hap­pen, because the Justice Minister is giv­ing mur­der­ers half-off their would-be sen­tences if they sim­ply plead guilty.
In addi­tion to that, he also wants to wipe clean the record of vio­lent mur­der­ers and rapists.
Those are the hall­marks of a fail­ing state.….….….….….….….….….……

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.