The punishment must fit the crime

Two news items caught my eyes last week both of them shocking and disgraceful. The first was captioned, “Sisters 9, 8 and 7 reveal shocking details of sexual molestation” and the second, “Man 85 remanded on ammo charge”.

The first matter is a horrific crime perpetuated by sick individuals on defenseless infants and I will be following this case hoping that these beasts be dealt the full extent of the law.

The latter news item has me baffled even up to the very minute as I pen this article. Here we have a case of a poor, deaf farmer caught with an unlicensed firearm – a shotgun to be exact with a few rounds of ammunition. The Magistrate, (quoting Kaieteur News) ordered this elderly mute and his wife to prison even though the duo could not understand clearly what was going on around them. Both the old man and his wife would have been put in the lockups were it not for the timely intervention of a lawyer who saw the lopsided dispensing of justice.

Now I am not for one moment advocating that persons should be allowed to break the law without being punished far from it, even if that offending individual is an aged person but the punishment must fit the crime.

Then it begs the question why was this poor old man so severely punished for a shotgun, a shotgun! When he himself responded with the little he heard, that it was used to kill monkeys and hogs on his farm. The only sane answer that comes to mind is that periodic psychiatric evaluations be carried out on some of these persons sitting on the bench in our courtrooms in Guyana today.

Neil Adams