Please allow me to express a few thoughts that have been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, in hopes that other readers will provide their input on one or all of these concerns and in the end, we collectively would be creating a forum of sorts on the various points of personal concern of which I now write.
Firstly, there is the right of the community to be informed of potential offenders in our midst vs. the basic legal principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law by a jury of their peers and further that they have exhausted all their legal rights.
In a population pool as small as ours, can anyone with an Internet address be called to jury duty nowadays and be trusted to limit themselves to examine the evidence presented in an objective, non-biased manner and hand out a fair verdict?
The seemingly new idea of placing alleged offenders on the world-wide web and having them quickly ‘convicted’ in the court of open public opinion does not bode well with me. We must guard against this seemingly rush to judgment becoming an obsession and in the end, allowing a hardened criminal who should be removed from the law abiding midst of our society and neighbourhoods, remain simply because a fair and just trial could not reasonably be expected to be given due to the alleged perpetrator already having been convicted in the open arena of public opinion and world-wide web court of weak jurisprudence.
Secondly, I believe most of us agree that the sentence handed out on the recent case of indecent assault on a five-year-old was – to say the least – ludicrous, and a result of laws that are not severe enough to be effective deterrents for the kind of gut-wrenching offences we are witnessing in our islands today.
Thirdly; though I expect the usual segments of the population to oppose the reinstatement of capital punishment, I really fail to see why the law abiding majority of us should pay for years of humane living conditions for offenders that obviously forfeited their humanity when they chose to commit such heinous offences.
The idea of my hard-earned tax money being utilized to provide three meals a day, medical and dental care, clothes and a token salary to such offenders is anathema to me. I would prefer to help needy children or the elderly with my tax dollars.
And this is with the backdrop that today’s crimes seemingly are being committed by younger perpetrators, thus their likelihood of long term incarceration and additional prison housing costs will be of a greater and ever larger costs to me and you.
Thus we all need to be concerned in regards to what now seems to be an attitude of creeping criminality and passive acceptance of criminality in our society. It ought to be and must be stamped out at its early stages, or else we will all suffer long term and dire consequences for failure to act decisively today.
In conclusion, I think that: (1) excessive leakage of information before a case goes to trial will ultimately undermine our legal system; (2) Our laws need to become as harsh as the crimes that are being committed and (3), if reliance on the old adage of I want my pound of flesh, is to be relied on, then I too think that life in prison is not enough for murder in the first degree and neither are a few years for a serious crime against a minor!
In short, we have much to be thankful for yet in our mostly tranquil and socially harmonic society, and this should give us all greater impetus to rally around the campaign to stamp out creeping criminality within our Caymanian society.
George R. Ebanks
Related Videos
