Justice not Blind, but Dumb
Common Sense
John Maxwell
I have no confidence in the Jamaican machinery of justice. I have no confidence in the Jamaica Constabulary whose job it is to enforce the law and maintain order.
I have no confidence in the court system, which is meant to deliver justice equally to all: to the rich and poor, equally to the ordinary citizen and to the officers and agents of the state. I have no confidence in the politicians and other deputies of the public interest.
I have no confidence in my own profession of journalism; no confidence that we will unhesitatingly and consistently defend the public interest, no matter how powerful the forces against us.
I am confident that my views reflect the views of a majority of Jamaicans, rich and poor.
The fact that we have no confidence in the systems does not mean that we have no confidence in most of the individual people who make up these systems. I believe that the systems have been corrupted over time and that they have no present intention of correcting themselves.
I am certain, from my conversations with thousands of people, that most Jamaicans believe that justice in Jamaica is a kind of lottery and not a fair one. It is a lottery in which the dice are loaded against the ordinary citizen, against the poor, the unfashionable, the deviant and the dissenter, against all those who are unwilling - or more likely - unable to try to corrupt the system further in order to achieve due process and equity. Some of us have been saying these things for years, and the Press, generally, has ignored us.
Such critiques do not count in the general public discourse. People who rock the boat obviously mean to overturn it and drown everybody in it.
These militias were manned by the descendants of the white slavemasters and their servants whose job it was to defend slavery and later, the rights of the propertied classes. The constabulary was founded to give a human face to the rules of the oppressors. Colonialism was supposed to be a benign dictatorship. It was a dictatorship all right, but never benign.
If you have enough money you can still hire policemen - special constables - to do your bidding. And they come complete with firearms, and as ferocious as Dobermans.
The police control the bases of the courts systems, deciding when they will appear to give evidence and when they can't be bothered, without penalty and at great expense and discomfiture to the ordinary citizen.
The police still control the jury system, although in the 70s the system was supposedly reformed to guarantee fairness. Summonses to jury duty are still controlled by the police who can therefore foil the democracy of the electoral rolls from which jurors are supposedly randomly selected.
The police have, so it is said, been de-politicised and democratised, but all that process has done is to allow an evil 'old boy' network to develop in the police force, against democracy, against the interest of anyone except the mid-level controllers of discipline within the police force itself. The police force is against the idea of raising its general educational and cultural level. In the JCF, the law of Buggin's turn is firmly entrenched.
Quality is secondary to seniority and cronyism.Though there is, I believe, a majority of good people within the force, a perverted esprit de corps silences dissent and perverts the public interest.
The futility of the JCF is best demonstrated by one simple statistic.
According to the JCF itself, the police are now 'clearing up' just over one third of crimes reported to them, and one suspects in the case of murder that the fraction cleared up, even taking into account all those newly-wanted-men shot dead, is probably less than one in five.
There were nearly 1,500 murders in 2004. If the police 'cleared up' even one fifth (20%) of those without killing the perpetrator, we should expect that there would have been 300 murder trials more or less, in that year. Since 80% of the murders occurred in the Kingston metropolitan Area, we should be seeing nearly 250 murder trials annually in the Home Circuit Court, or five every week.
I would like to ask the Commissioner of Police, the Chief Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions to tell us exactly how many murder trials there were in the Home Circuit Court last year? I doubt that any of them knows.
The whole world knows, however, that the major deterrent to any crime is the probablity of being caught. If we were sure that our sins shall find us out, few of us would ever embark on any kind of transgression. It is the threat of being caught that deters, not the punishment. The Jamaican police believe, against all evidence, however, that nothing deters as effectively as the threat of a policeman's bullet.
They are obviously, catastrophically wrong, but they will not learn.
It was reported last week that peace broke out almost as soon as the police established a presence in Arnett Gardens/Jones Town. Did that surprise you?
For those of us who have been saying that the state has abandoned the poor, it was no surprise.
If a security vacuum exists, somebody will fill it, and those somebodies are not trained to be policemen, they depend on traditional slave-era violence, the fundamentalist rubrtic that if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Unfortunately for those in the ghetto, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the bad gunmen from the 'good'.
And, As the ghetto becomes increasingly blind, so does the rest of the society, who are perfectly content to suggest that the police can do no wrong even when they kill a few innocents in protection of the higher economic and societal powers.
We need a new police force.
The judges are obviously, generally biased towards the prosecution, unless it is a policeman or a rich person who is before the court. Apart from that, there are not enough trained judges or other court personnel, so cases take an eternity for resolution adding to public frustration and anger and to Injustice.
Mr Kent Pantry, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), obviously feels, like me, that justice was not done in the Reneto Adams/Beckford Kraal murder case.
In what I regard as a most unwise and uncharitable speech before the Kingston Rotary Club, Mr Pantry effectively claimed that murder was committed at Beckford Kraal.
He suggested strongly that the prosecution had proved its case by proving the following points:
My questions to Mr Pantry are simple:
Why, when it was known that the defence was being funded to the tune of millions by the Crown, did the Crown not ask for funds to brief leading counsel, QCs - to help present its case? Was it possible that this gave a signal to the jury that the Crown was not serious?
It is known that the defence seemed to have a free hand with public money and that other leading counsel were approached for the defence team, but refused to join the Adams bandwaggon - forswearing millions in fees. Why didn't the prosecution call such eminent counsel to its assistance? Isn't that what QCs are for?
And why did not Mr Pantry's office take the available steps to bring Danhai Williams - a crucial material witness for the prosecution - to testify about the planted gun? He could legitimately have been arrested and brought to court.
In regard to Mr Pantry's dispute with Dr Carolyn Gomes, head of Jamaicans for Justice, I have to say that I believe Dr Gomes and I do not believe Mr Pantry. I believe that the DPP could have done much more to bring a prosecution in the case of Michael Gayle (among several others) and that J4J should not have had to seek justice outside the jurisdiction.
The Jamaican "State Parties" have over decades, been notoriously delinquent in cases brought before the UN Human Rights Commission and the Inter American Commission for Human Rights.
When those ineffable Queen's Counsel, Messrs Patterson and K D Knight decided to withdraw from all international Human Rights jurisdictions several years ago I lambasted them, because it seemed to me that they were, contrary to their solemn political undertakings, reducing the chances of Jamaicans enjoying Universal Human Rights.
Patterson and Knight belatedly discovered that they couldn't withdraw from the IACHR without withdrawing from the Organisation of American States and hurriedly abandoned their inexcusable and utterly despicable positions. But they still withdrew from the UN's Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights - an act which should have revealed to the world their, true character.
When the DPPs office was established in 1962, at independence, it was protected from political partisanship on the ground that it was too important a function to be left to the vagaries of political weather. That now seems to me a mistake and I am now feel that the American system of electing prosecutors has a great deal to recommend it.
The protection of the DPP from political harrassment appears to have produced a sentiment that the DPP has no need to take public opinion into account. He thus becomes the sole judge of what may or may not be in the public interest. And this of course, can provoke the sort of bad tempered disputation between Mr Pantry and those of us who feel that in Jamaica, as in Haiti, human rights are under attack, not least from the Government and its agents.
My final questions are for the Chief Justice.
If what Mr Pantry says is true, did you adequately emphasise to the jury the crucial importance of the points he has now raised? And if you didn't do that, why didn't you?
Justice does not belong to the judges, any more than freedom of the Press belongs to the Press. They are both the inalienable property of the people, on whose behalf, from time to time, authority is delegated in the hope that Justice will not only be done, but manifestly be seen to be done.
In the Adams trial I submit that Justice was not manifestly seen to be done and in this, I call Mr Pantry as my first witness and Danhai Williams as my second.
In the discussion of the public interest, every single jamaican has the right to be heard. It is, after all, our interest - the interest of the poor and the rich, of the magnificoes and the most humble, of those with power and those without, and especially of those who are the weakest, most friendless and most vulnerable.
Journalists, policemen, judges and other lawyers, and politicians are only temporary caretakers of that interest. If we fail to deliver, we have no business pretending that we are doing our duty and the public interest demands that we either get out of the way or be removed.
John Maxwell
I have no confidence in the Jamaican machinery of justice. I have no confidence in the Jamaica Constabulary whose job it is to enforce the law and maintain order.I have no confidence in the court system, which is meant to deliver justice equally to all: to the rich and poor, equally to the ordinary citizen and to the officers and agents of the state. I have no confidence in the politicians and other deputies of the public interest.
I have no confidence in my own profession of journalism; no confidence that we will unhesitatingly and consistently defend the public interest, no matter how powerful the forces against us.
I am confident that my views reflect the views of a majority of Jamaicans, rich and poor.
The fact that we have no confidence in the systems does not mean that we have no confidence in most of the individual people who make up these systems. I believe that the systems have been corrupted over time and that they have no present intention of correcting themselves.
I am certain, from my conversations with thousands of people, that most Jamaicans believe that justice in Jamaica is a kind of lottery and not a fair one. It is a lottery in which the dice are loaded against the ordinary citizen, against the poor, the unfashionable, the deviant and the dissenter, against all those who are unwilling - or more likely - unable to try to corrupt the system further in order to achieve due process and equity. Some of us have been saying these things for years, and the Press, generally, has ignored us.
Such critiques do not count in the general public discourse. People who rock the boat obviously mean to overturn it and drown everybody in it.
The Police
The police have been dysfunctional ever since their foundation. The Jamaica Constabulary was formed after the 1865 rebellion to replace militias left over from slavery.These militias were manned by the descendants of the white slavemasters and their servants whose job it was to defend slavery and later, the rights of the propertied classes. The constabulary was founded to give a human face to the rules of the oppressors. Colonialism was supposed to be a benign dictatorship. It was a dictatorship all right, but never benign.
If you have enough money you can still hire policemen - special constables - to do your bidding. And they come complete with firearms, and as ferocious as Dobermans.
The police control the bases of the courts systems, deciding when they will appear to give evidence and when they can't be bothered, without penalty and at great expense and discomfiture to the ordinary citizen.
The police still control the jury system, although in the 70s the system was supposedly reformed to guarantee fairness. Summonses to jury duty are still controlled by the police who can therefore foil the democracy of the electoral rolls from which jurors are supposedly randomly selected.
The police have, so it is said, been de-politicised and democratised, but all that process has done is to allow an evil 'old boy' network to develop in the police force, against democracy, against the interest of anyone except the mid-level controllers of discipline within the police force itself. The police force is against the idea of raising its general educational and cultural level. In the JCF, the law of Buggin's turn is firmly entrenched.
Quality is secondary to seniority and cronyism.Though there is, I believe, a majority of good people within the force, a perverted esprit de corps silences dissent and perverts the public interest.
The futility of the JCF is best demonstrated by one simple statistic.
According to the JCF itself, the police are now 'clearing up' just over one third of crimes reported to them, and one suspects in the case of murder that the fraction cleared up, even taking into account all those newly-wanted-men shot dead, is probably less than one in five.
There were nearly 1,500 murders in 2004. If the police 'cleared up' even one fifth (20%) of those without killing the perpetrator, we should expect that there would have been 300 murder trials more or less, in that year. Since 80% of the murders occurred in the Kingston metropolitan Area, we should be seeing nearly 250 murder trials annually in the Home Circuit Court, or five every week.
I would like to ask the Commissioner of Police, the Chief Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions to tell us exactly how many murder trials there were in the Home Circuit Court last year? I doubt that any of them knows.
The whole world knows, however, that the major deterrent to any crime is the probablity of being caught. If we were sure that our sins shall find us out, few of us would ever embark on any kind of transgression. It is the threat of being caught that deters, not the punishment. The Jamaican police believe, against all evidence, however, that nothing deters as effectively as the threat of a policeman's bullet.
They are obviously, catastrophically wrong, but they will not learn.
It was reported last week that peace broke out almost as soon as the police established a presence in Arnett Gardens/Jones Town. Did that surprise you?
For those of us who have been saying that the state has abandoned the poor, it was no surprise.
If a security vacuum exists, somebody will fill it, and those somebodies are not trained to be policemen, they depend on traditional slave-era violence, the fundamentalist rubrtic that if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Unfortunately for those in the ghetto, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the bad gunmen from the 'good'.
And, As the ghetto becomes increasingly blind, so does the rest of the society, who are perfectly content to suggest that the police can do no wrong even when they kill a few innocents in protection of the higher economic and societal powers.
We need a new police force.
The Courts
The court system is flawed, flawed to the point almost of breakdown. The judges are generally recruited from the ranks of prosecutors, who regard judgeships as the society's reward for their years of thankless labour in the courts offices and the offices of the Duirector of Public Prosecutions.The judges are obviously, generally biased towards the prosecution, unless it is a policeman or a rich person who is before the court. Apart from that, there are not enough trained judges or other court personnel, so cases take an eternity for resolution adding to public frustration and anger and to Injustice.
Mr Kent Pantry, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), obviously feels, like me, that justice was not done in the Reneto Adams/Beckford Kraal murder case.
In what I regard as a most unwise and uncharitable speech before the Kingston Rotary Club, Mr Pantry effectively claimed that murder was committed at Beckford Kraal.
He suggested strongly that the prosecution had proved its case by proving the following points:
- That [at least] one person was undoubtedly killed AFTER the police had control of the crime scene;
- That a firearm had been planted by the police
- That the dead people were shot by guns fired inside the room rather than from outside;
- That the wounds of the deceased contradicted the unsworn allegation of a 'shoot-out" and disclosed, instead, "controlled" [murderous] shooting
My questions to Mr Pantry are simple:
Why, when it was known that the defence was being funded to the tune of millions by the Crown, did the Crown not ask for funds to brief leading counsel, QCs - to help present its case? Was it possible that this gave a signal to the jury that the Crown was not serious?
It is known that the defence seemed to have a free hand with public money and that other leading counsel were approached for the defence team, but refused to join the Adams bandwaggon - forswearing millions in fees. Why didn't the prosecution call such eminent counsel to its assistance? Isn't that what QCs are for?
And why did not Mr Pantry's office take the available steps to bring Danhai Williams - a crucial material witness for the prosecution - to testify about the planted gun? He could legitimately have been arrested and brought to court.
In regard to Mr Pantry's dispute with Dr Carolyn Gomes, head of Jamaicans for Justice, I have to say that I believe Dr Gomes and I do not believe Mr Pantry. I believe that the DPP could have done much more to bring a prosecution in the case of Michael Gayle (among several others) and that J4J should not have had to seek justice outside the jurisdiction.
The Jamaican "State Parties" have over decades, been notoriously delinquent in cases brought before the UN Human Rights Commission and the Inter American Commission for Human Rights.
When those ineffable Queen's Counsel, Messrs Patterson and K D Knight decided to withdraw from all international Human Rights jurisdictions several years ago I lambasted them, because it seemed to me that they were, contrary to their solemn political undertakings, reducing the chances of Jamaicans enjoying Universal Human Rights.
Patterson and Knight belatedly discovered that they couldn't withdraw from the IACHR without withdrawing from the Organisation of American States and hurriedly abandoned their inexcusable and utterly despicable positions. But they still withdrew from the UN's Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights - an act which should have revealed to the world their, true character.
When the DPPs office was established in 1962, at independence, it was protected from political partisanship on the ground that it was too important a function to be left to the vagaries of political weather. That now seems to me a mistake and I am now feel that the American system of electing prosecutors has a great deal to recommend it.
The protection of the DPP from political harrassment appears to have produced a sentiment that the DPP has no need to take public opinion into account. He thus becomes the sole judge of what may or may not be in the public interest. And this of course, can provoke the sort of bad tempered disputation between Mr Pantry and those of us who feel that in Jamaica, as in Haiti, human rights are under attack, not least from the Government and its agents.
My final questions are for the Chief Justice.
If what Mr Pantry says is true, did you adequately emphasise to the jury the crucial importance of the points he has now raised? And if you didn't do that, why didn't you?
Justice does not belong to the judges, any more than freedom of the Press belongs to the Press. They are both the inalienable property of the people, on whose behalf, from time to time, authority is delegated in the hope that Justice will not only be done, but manifestly be seen to be done.
In the Adams trial I submit that Justice was not manifestly seen to be done and in this, I call Mr Pantry as my first witness and Danhai Williams as my second.
In the discussion of the public interest, every single jamaican has the right to be heard. It is, after all, our interest - the interest of the poor and the rich, of the magnificoes and the most humble, of those with power and those without, and especially of those who are the weakest, most friendless and most vulnerable.
Journalists, policemen, judges and other lawyers, and politicians are only temporary caretakers of that interest. If we fail to deliver, we have no business pretending that we are doing our duty and the public interest demands that we either get out of the way or be removed.
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