Following Caricom’s recent Regional Symposium on Crime and Violence, Guyana has committed to implementing a number of measures with an overhaul of the criminal justice system an area of priority, Attorney General Anil Nandlall has said.
“As minister with responsibility for justice and the legal sector, I was particularly pleased by the resolution that spoke to a comprehensive overhaul of the criminal justice system. This is an initiative that Guyana will vigorously pursue,” Nandlall told the Stabroek News.
The Attorney General said that there are “simply too many complaints”, of magistrates making decisions that appear “irrational” and which attract public criticism and there must be legal guidelines in place to avoid this.
“Magistrates grant bail when the relevant law prohibits bail unless special reasons are established, without any such special reason being shown,” he posited.
Citing an example, Nandlall said, “In one case, a magistrate granted bail to two Brazilian nationals, who without passports or permission, flew an aircraft illegally into Guyana loaded with hundreds of kilos of cocaine, and no special reason was shown. In these circumstances, bail is prohibited unless a special reason is shown.
“Moreover, these persons had no legal status in Guyana, so to release them on bail into the streets of Guyana was simply perpetuating the commission and continuation of a number of immigration offences. These clear legal principles were simply ignored by the magistrate. As Attorney General, I was forced to file legal proceedings in the High Court to quash the magistrate’s decision.”
Specifically for his sector, he opined that he has always tried, as far as possible, “to have the Government of Guyana implement model Caricom legislation in Guyana to bring greater harmonisation in our laws with the laws of other member states”.
Nandlall announced that Guyana will soon import human resource personnel to enhance the state’s forensic capabilities in the Guyana Police Force as well as the Guyana Forensic Science Laboratory. It is expected that this initiative will enhance the state’s investigative and prosecutorial capabilities.
Also, he said that the government will soon implement laws that will dispense with preliminary inquiries in the magistrates’ courts and improve and encourage plea bargaining in criminal ligation. Also, amendments will be pursued to do judge-only trials in certain criminal matters, all in keeping with resolutions which have come out of the symposium.
“In fact, many of these legislation are already in draft. However, now, Guyana will be pursuing them as part of a regional crime-fighting initiative,” he said.
And then there are instances, according to Nandlall, where magistrates use recusing themselves from cases or using that there be preliminary inquiries. This in turn sees some of the cases being weakened while others are prolonged in a system where long waits have been a bugbear for years.
“In cases involving certain persons, some magistrates are refusing to dispose of these matters summarily and are insisting that preliminary inquiries be held, whereas they order summary trials in much more serious offences. Prosecutors have been complaining that all manner of objections from defence counsel in these cases are entertained and even upheld,” he reasoned.
“…It is clear that magistrates are influenced by whom the defendant and defence counsel are. This is a travesty of justice.”
And from cases that he keeps up to date with from the reports in the press, he said that sometimes it appears that justice seems biased to favour certain people. “Criminal charges filed against certain persons. These magistrates are recusing themselves, citing all manner of spurious reasons and transferring these cases to other magistrates. As a result, these charges are repeatedly delayed through no fault of the prosecution and defence counsel for the persons charged are filing proceedings in the High Court, claiming that their clients are being denied a trial within reasonable time – a right guaranteed to them by the Constitution. These chronic delays also lead to cases being dismissed by the very magistrates who are delaying them,” he lamented.
Nandlall noted that the examples he used here were identical to those highlighted by Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves in his presentation at the symposium.
Similarly, he said, Caribbean Court of Justice Judge Jacob Wit made a presentation where he said that the criminal administration of justice in the Caribbean was in chaos, citing some of these reasons.
“This state of affairs must trouble the minds of law-abiding Guyanese and therefore the call for a comprehensive overhaul of the criminal justice system is welcomed in Guyana, and soon this process will begin. Needless to say, it will be done in a manner that duly recognises, preserves, and protects the sacred constitutional concept of independence of the judiciary,” the Attorney General emphasised.
The Trinidad Express had reported that Gonsalves criticised members of the judiciary who grant bail to murder accused, asking whether they lived on Mars.
Contributing to the Prime Ministers’ roundtable discussion at the Regional Symposium: Violence as a Public Health Issue – The Caricom Challenge at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Port of Spain, Gonsalves also said the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church were wrong for opposing the death penalty. He said people in the “taverns” all over the region wanted the death penalty to be carried out.
On the issue of the death penalty, Gonsalves said: “I am a Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church says we shouldn’t have the death penalty. My mother was a Legion of Mary and she taught me that you shouldn’t have the death penalty. I happen to think that both my mother and the Pope are wrong. For murder, other than a crime of passion, you should get the death penalty. “And if the Europeans don’t like that… they had it for a long time… and they may not want to bring it back…If we [could] have that [the death penalty] as a particular option for punishment and for the courts not to make it virtually impossible to carry out the death penalty.”
He said what he was saying was what people in the taverns in Trinidad and Tobago and in Barbados and in all Caricom countries in the region were saying.
On the issue of the judiciary, Gonsalves said: “Too many of our judges and magistrates are too soft. Sometimes you get the impression that some magistrates, depending on who is the lawyer, their clients seem to get better treatment. Everybody talking about this, yuh know, but they talking about it behind closed doors. You don’t hear it from a Prime Minister. Well, let us begin to talk about these things too because all of these matters touch on how we are going to address this question.”
He said Caricom countries had put a lot of resources into the police, into crime-fighting, into the judiciary, into prosecutions. He said the region’s laws needed to be updated in defence of public order and safety. “I am not calling for any totalitarian measure but in aspects of our judiciary there is a creeping lack of awareness as to some of the problems we face,” he said.
Nandlall said he was privileged to be part of Guyana’s delegation and that the discourse and the presentations were extremely insightful as they were enlightening.
“A wide array of areas identified to have some causative effect to crime and violence in the Caribbean were addressed. No doubt crime, violence, and criminality constitute formidable threats, not only to our democracy but our very survival. From a Caribbean perspective, it seems to be getting progressively worse each year. The symposium was therefore extremely timely and crucially required,” he related.
Of the “several fundamental resolutions” that emanated from the symposium, he said that Guyana, as part of the Caricom collective, “will endeavour to implement these resolutions.
“In fact, in Guyana, we have begun to work on many of these very issues that are the subject of some of these resolutions, the others no doubt we will begin work to implement.”
