Don’t blame judge for death of soldier, cop

Last week there were mutterings from certain locations, including Jamaica House, that the killings of a soldier and a policeman by gunmen were due to the ruling by the supreme Court a week earlier, that the constitutional rights of five men, held in jail for periods ranging from 250 to over 400 days under a state of emergency (SOE), were breached.

If I am following the matter carefully, Supreme Court Justice Bertram Morrison did not rule that the state of emergency was unconstitutional. He said that the men’s constitutional rights were breached — something that any blind individual —except for Jamaica’s attorney general, could see.

Now to hear that certain people who frequent Jamaica House were condemning the judge’s ruling, and go as far as blame the killings on the learned man, is disingenuous. Justice Morrison did the right thing. Again, it is absolutely inhumane to hold anyone in detention for so long.

Suspects held must be charged without much delay. Many times, people are held out of malice and there is subsequently nothing to charge them with.

I have already told the story of a man who was held by a policeman during a SOE operation, and locked away for months before he was eventually released. The reason: The policeman had taken a liking to the man’s girlfriend, and so the law enforcer felt that he could be given a free hand to build a relationship with the woman, if there was less interference, so the state of emergency popped up as the best option. This is a factual story which I know of only too well.

The Government needs to come better with its plans for crime control, and not depend so much on emergency measures. When we were told in 2016 that we would not have to shut our windows and doors at night, it should have had meaning, and not merely used as a campaign tool.

This is not the first time that gunmen have killed soldiers and police personnel. Laws need to be toughened, so they act as deterrents to individuals who cut down the people on the front line of Jamaica’s protection. But what do our legislators do? They sit in Parliament, warm the chairs by not pushing through such laws, and then when something unfortunate happens you hear them with their counterfeit bawling. They are in a position to keep crime under control, yet, they continue to fool around.