Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Calls for the re­turn of the hang­man have in­creased fol­low­ing the re­cent spike in vi­o­lent crimes but two stake­hold­ers warn that en­forc­ing the death penal­ty will not solve that prob­lem. In­stead, pres­i­dent of the Crim­i­nal Bar As­so­ci­a­tion Is­rael Khan and ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Cen­tre for Hu­man Rights Denise Pitch­er rec­om­mend re­form of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.

T&T’s mur­der toll stood at 164 as of yes­ter­day morn­ing, high­er than the 141 mur­ders record­ed for the same pe­ri­od last year.

Pitch­er said there isn’t any ev­i­dence glob­al­ly that the threat of death de­ters crim­i­nals. In­stead, it’s the threat of guar­an­teed swift jus­tice that will do the trick.

“That is what will re­al­ly be an ef­fec­tive way to deal with crime in Trinidad and To­ba­go—a more ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem be­cause right now, based on the de­lays and the lengthy wait on re­mand, the per­sons that are com­mit­ting crime know they are not go­ing to face any pun­ish­ment any time soon (there will be) mul­ti­ple ad­journ­ments,” she said.

“All of these things con­tribute to the fact that there is no cer­tain­ty of pun­ish­ment any time soon.”

Khan said the death penal­ty will do lit­tle to dis­suade “pro­fes­sion­al mur­der­ers” and could make the sit­u­a­tion worse.

“What will hap­pen is that once you have the death penal­ty hang­ing over the mur­der­ers, there were key wit­ness­es who would have wit­nessed the com­mis­sion of that mur­der, they would kill them. They would know once they are charged and con­vict­ed they would be ex­e­cut­ed so there are two sides of the coin in re­la­tion to that,” he said.

Khan said swift con­vic­tions are key to dis­pelling the per­cep­tion that the crim­i­nal el­e­ments can get away with their heinous deeds.

“First of all the crim­i­nals be­lieve they would not be caught and when they are caught they know they will not be pros­e­cut­ed with­in a rea­son­able time and they can re­main in jail and they will re­main in jail and call hits from in­side the jail,” he said.

“They have to set up a sys­tem that could ex­pe­dite mat­ters. They should have bet­ter plea bar­gain­ing. They should have more judges first of all… and most of all, the full com­ple­ment of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tion’s pro­fes­sion­al staff to pros­e­cute.

“You can’t have all these judges and all these courts and you have no­body to pros­e­cute. Al­so, if they have first, sec­ond and third-de­gree mur­ders, peo­ple would get the im­pres­sion that once they serve their term of im­pris­on­ment and they are re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed they could get back to so­ci­ety. We should have a pa­role board, we don’t have that in Trinidad, where peo­ple can come out and if they com­mit crimes they are put back in.”

Pitch­er point­ed out that re­mand ac­counts for al­most two-thirds of the peo­ple in prison and since there is no sep­a­ra­tion be­tween hard­ened crim­i­nals and those de­tained for less­er crimes, prison can be a breed­ing ground for knowl­edge and skills to be trans­ferred be­tween in­mates await­ing tri­al.

“Some­times peo­ple spend…a longer time in re­mand that ex­ceeds the time for the crime in some cas­es. It is al­so our in­ef­fi­cient and in­ef­fec­tive jus­tice sys­tem that con­tributes to crime,” she said.

She al­so rec­om­mend­ed amend­ments to the Con­sti­tu­tion to al­low for a manda­to­ry time frame for an ac­cused to go be­fore the courts.

Khan sug­gest­ed that in the short term there should be joint po­lice-army pa­trols in crime hotspots. He said the pres­ence of high­ly trained of­fi­cers would sig­nal to crim­i­nals that if they com­mit of­fences and opt to en­gage in a shoot-out with law en­force­ment “more or less they would be killed be­cause the po­lice will shoot in self-de­fence.”

Calls to At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour for com­ment on the mat­ter went unan­swered.