Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 13, 2019 Editorial
Sentences are being reduced: too severe. Overdone and draconian. Leanings toward leniency. Rehabilitation, not revenge. Punishing without being vindictive.
Appeals tribunals have listened to their inner voices. Commendable. They should listen to the voices and wails of victims and families. Communities wrenched and wounded. Too much violence; too much brutality and recklessness and terrorising. Needlessly. Deliberately. Where is the balancing hand of societal justice? The equalising scales of hard labour? Of harsh lashes. Of sending messages? Of effective deterrents?
Society is in a hard, bad, and dark place. There is fear and cowering. There is trouble facing the streets; venturing into a bank; shopping for ordinary wares. Something has to give. Before there are no more bodies and limbs to give over to the heinous. Cash is gone; so, too, is confidence.
Judges hold the key. Okay to diminish some sentences. But cannot be by too much. Should not be halved and quartered. A slight shaving here and there. From a hundred or eighty, take away twenty, no more than thirty. Too many repeat offenders; too many condoners, too many disagreeable circumstances.
A Bloomberg story on June 12, tells of a passenger involved in a hijacking hoax via an airborne aircraft sentenced to life imprisonment and fined over US$700,000. That’s life in prison for a 38-year-old scaremonger, although nobody died. The mere threat, the potential for terror, was enough to warrant that merciless sentence.
This society is subject to near uninterrupted brutality at the hands of vicious criminals in murderous episodes that range from drunken bar and wedding house brawls; to daily weaponised banditry; to violent occurrences of domestic abuse, which result in the deaths of mainly women. The streets have to be cleared; if that means that jails have to be filled for a long time, let them be. Society – whether in homes, or the walks of business life, or the leisure of socialising – has to be protected through hard messages. Criminals brought before the bar of justice must shiver; and if that means greater severity, then so be it.
Leniency is not working; too many recidivists, too many stone killers roaming around; too many too willing to end life. There is little fear of punishment. The spectre of prison holds no terror. From the reactions of some of the sentenced, there is little remorse, no edge to the punishment handed down. It as if, even in losing, they have won, still hold the upper hand, and know something that society does not.
Punishment should not be such a breeze; so meaningless. The judiciary, in its entirety, has to be of a mind that this society needs to be rescued from the clutches of those who make it wretched. Be it street crime or corporate fraud, there must be zeal in applying the full force of the law.
It would be helpful if the magistracy is given more tools and options. Though the death penalty is effectively moot, its sting rendered impotent by lengthy delays, the lash must be a greater part of penalties. The cat o’ nine should be reintroduced. Barbaric these elements may be, but the reality is that only decent, law-abiding society can speak of the receiving end of barbarities. This has to stop. Longer sentences; consecutive sentences.
Judges do not live in a vacuum; they cannot be that unaware of, or insensitive to, the tribulations and traumas of Guyanese life. One of the major limitations paraded before disturbed, disillusioned Guyanese is the farce of a four-year maximum for heavyweight violations. Just will not do. Insulting to a besieged society made vulnerable by crooked politicians and criminal circles.
The arms of the law must be in step with the demands of the times. When dealing with those who have nothing to lose, take away the one thing that they do have to lose: freedom. Wrest it from them for as much as is allowed under the law.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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