At the first of two news conference at the Cabinet retreat at the Magdalena Grand hotel in Tobago in early March, a journalist asked Prime Minister Keith Rowley the following question: “Do you think the resumption of hanging would bring consequences to the murders the country is experiencing?” He said: “The current law in Trinidad and Tobago is that the punishment for a capital offence is loss of life by hanging. That is the law.
“The real problem, over and above that, is that before you can hang anybody, you have to find out who commits the crime. Then you have to arrest them. Then you have to charge them. Then you have to get a conviction and then after they are convicted you have to carry out the hanging within a particular period of time.
“So if all of those precursors are not in fact in place, then hanging is but a pipe dream, because you can only hang who you convict and who you convict within five years.
“And worse, you don’t even know who has committed the crime. So let’s start with the foundation: Let us detect who committed the crime and get such persons off the streets into incarceration; ensure that the trials are speedy and then you could talk about hanging because all kinds of impediments are in the way.
“So, there are a number of things that the government is focusing on and when they all come together—even as we are fighting crime at the level of the Privy Council with convicted murderers, we have new crimes to fight in the schools now. School children now on charges going to court, in large numbers.
“This is not a good place and situation to be in. But we can’t give up in any way. We have to fight on all fronts.”
It was my impression then that Dr Rowley gave a perfectly rational, coherent and intelligent answer to the question. Many other politicians in this region, faced a murder rate well in excess of one a day, might easily have fallen back on the well-worn trope of hang them high.
Dr Rowley is absolutely right, in theory, that the main deterrents of crime are the fear of being apprehended by the police and the fear of being found guilty by a jury of one’s peers. You don’t have to be a Renee Cummings to come to that conclusion.
But our prime minister would have to be living in la-la land not to realise that the chances of our police service arresting someone for murder are about one in ten. And having arrested someone for murder, the chances of our court system allowing murder accused to face justice in a timely fashion—one that is in accordance with first world standards—are probably about one in 20.
That means that of the 205 murders committed in this country so far this year, the police would have a reasonable chance of apprehending 20 and, as for our court system ensuring that murder accused are not held on remand for years and years…. Given those odds, does it surprise anyone that murders are being committed with impunity in this country?
This is a country, lest it be forgotten, in which a high-profile businesswoman was kidnapped in December 2006 and it took our criminal justice system more than nine years between the men being arrested and the completion of their trial.
And this is a country in which one of our best and highest-profile lawyers was executed—a stone’s throw from her high-rise One Woodbrook Place apartment—in May 2014 and the matter is languishing at the preliminary inquiry stage more than two years later.
Is the pace at which the criminal justice system—both the police and the courts—operates in this country acceptable?
But the more fundamental question is this: What has this PNM administration—and the last UNC one—done to improve the quality of homicide detection and the ability of the judiciary to deliver justice in a timely fashion? I know that those are issues for the Commissioner of Police and the Chief Justice.
But the prime minister also told journalists at the Magdalena Grand meeting room back in March that the Government “intends to make the necessary resources available and to hold people accountable.”
In terms of making the resources available, I wonder if Prime Minister Rowley has ever asked Commissioner of Police Stephen Williams what he needs to dramatically improve the country’s homicide detection rate?
And I wonder if Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi has ever asked Chief Justice Ivor Archie what does he need to speed up the pace of justice at the criminal assizes?
And how can the Prime Minister be satisfied that his administration has done all that is necessary to improve the detection of murders and the pace of justice when there are still issues with the collection and cataloguing of DNA evidence, as was recently disclosed at a joint select committee meeting? So Dr Rowley is right when he says there are “all kinds of impediments” that the Government has to deal with before hanging can even be considered. But what is the Government doing to reduce, if not eliminate, those impediments…even in this guava season?
