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Last Easter weekend Minister of National Security, Peter Bunting, (free, single and disengaged and free to assemble or intermingle with whomever he chooses), was ‘cooling out’ with female friends at a private villa in the exclusive resort area of San San in lush-green Portland.
At some stage a man gained entry to the villa; we are told, through a window and removed valuable items such as smart-phones, cameras, laptops etc. In quick time, the items were recovered, the perpetrator uncovered and held, the man charged, brought to trial and sentenced to two years.
Even for a developed country that would have been considered the epitome of what justice should be. Swift, fair and decisive and, carried out before the eyes of the nation!
Last week, the Prime Minister’s brother was robbed and assaulted by men in the heart of downtown Kingston. It may just have been a wee bit slower than the proverbial ‘two shakes of a duck’s tail’ but in a matter of days a man was held and, we can be certain based on the cosmic speed given to Bunting’s matter that he will be put before the courts and dealt with in an even shorter time.
After all, Minister Peter Bunting may be a big boss but, Portia Simpson Miller, the Prime Minister is his boss and, she is the bigger boss.
Even if we should delude ourselves by pretending that we are all equal under the law, that when we elect our representatives, they are our servants and, among them, the Prime Minister is ‘first among equals,’ we really ought not to have a problem with wrongs perpetrated against our political leaders being dealt with in the swiftest possible time.
That is the ideal. Hopping on the back of this ideal should be the same attitude of the police and the courts system towards delivering justice to us, the lesser beings, who are now deemed more loathsome and unwashed than those in the political directorate and very definitely undeserving of the kind of justice dished out to those who caused minister Bunting and the prime minister a few sleepless nights.
We have been told that there are about 40,000 cases forming the backlog or, the clog hampering the speedy delivery of justice in this country. While I have not sought nor gathered any data or details about the mechanics which led to this backlog (incomplete files from the police, DPP, cases ‘lost’ in the system, people locked up and also ‘lost’ in the prisons, jails) it is known that our judges still take notes by hand and, there are not sufficient numbers of them.
One can only imagine the confusion in the back office in relation to the filing system, those overwhelmed by it and sheer difficulty of determining what must be placed on the roster tomorrow. To the poor man at street level, that should never be his concern but, he certainly well knows that once he or a member of his household is wronged, justice for him is like hitting the lucky Cashpot number. It is highly desirable but, it hardly ever happens.
The Prime Minister and our Security minister will have no such concerns because they know the reality of them being better than the rest of us.
They are also quite sure that we would want them, our supposed ‘servants’ to have what is denied to us because, well, that is how the poor and the idiotic routinely demean themselves while they lay prostrate before their masters.
In other words, Portia and Peter are more than a cut above the rest of us and, we should accept the fact that we will never, even as hope, get the sort of justice they received. The best that we can eke out for ourselves in brutish Jamaica is the opposite of what a man said to me years ago.
After he moved as a ‘country boy’ to town, he bought a bicycle, started selling goods from that bicycle, then rented a small shop on Maxfield Avenue. One shop grew to two and then there were three. The man started making ‘mad’ money, working 20 hour days and having a client list almost as long as the seconds in those hours.
Barely literate and highly trustful of two crooked bankers, the man was in a few years reduced to near penury and the little he had left was eaten away by lawyers all too eager to conspire with those on the other side. The bankers were found guilty but in a much more reduced form. They never served time and were eventually given soft paddling (fines) by the courts.
When all the parties were lined up, on one side were bankers, lawyers, an accountant from a co-operative and the ‘justice system.’ On the other side was this man who spoke a country man’s language and foolishly believed that even though his ways were simple, two bankers could actually be trusted with ‘signature rights’ on his business matters.
One day, a few years ago we sat down in my living room and as he spoke, my heart bled for him. The truth was, the ‘system’ was out in full array against him. Outside my gate was his beaten-up old van. Like him, it had seen better days.
‘Mr. Wignall, mi go uptown fi justice, mi go downtown fi justice and me can’t find justice. Remember now, mi neva go mid town.’
I didn’t quite catch the meaning of the ‘midtown’ justice. I was having a slow day.
‘Downtown an uptown a di court system. Midtown a di gunman, Mr. Wignall. Sometime dat is all di likkle man can resort to. Him can’t win wid di justice system.’
I am certain that those who deem themselves ‘honourable’ and allow the system to dub them in that fallacious cloak of hypocrisy are feeling quite good about themselves as they grow fat and feel safe on Animal Farm.
Miss Mattie’s daughter who was brutally raped and Mass Tom’s grandson who has been locked up for a year without charge will never know the sweet smell of justice. What they see and feel in an acute manner is that justice is only given to those who the robots vote for.
The more diehard among the robots will even deny their own the right to justice with, ‘If something nuh go so, it nearly go so.’ Hogwash!
That would be the local reprise of Occam’s razor which states that ‘among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.’
Justice however cannot be made on hypothesis neither can it be based on assumptions.
In Jamaica the general assumption is the that scared little man from ‘out a bush,’ while standing before a stern judge in a court of law may be not guilty of the crime for which he is being tried but, on some day, at some other place, he did some wrong, undetermined in scope but, since we have him here, let us put him away. Let us give him up to ’the crowd’ and thus, provide them with the palliative that justice has been done.
The Prime Minister and the minister of National Security are our bosses and, we are not even worthy of being considered ‘servants’ in good standing. They and their relatives will always be guaranteed justice but the servants can only celebrate vicariously as they dream of and wish for the real one which has been denied to them for too long.
Why we must be extremely vigilant on the Tivoli Commission of Inquiry
I have no idea if Mr. Emil George, Q.C, Chairman of the debacle that were the findings of the Manatt Commission, after retiring home the evening that the results were made public told himself that he had done a damn fine job.
If he did do so then someone needs to bring new definition to a few words and terms. We need to redefine ‘fine’ as in,
‘She is a fine looking woman. Almost as ‘damn fine’ as Chupski.’
Or,
‘After the divorce, he made friends with a barstool. He named it Cindy and for the next two years they struck up an intimate relationship. When we spoke, his hands could barely hold on to the glass of rum. They were unsteady and his lips were quivering. As I stared at him through the smoke, I could tell that he had allowed the mental anguish to do a ‘damn fine job’ on him.’
And then we need to reexamine ‘job.’ We could say that a scientist, ‘…after laboring for 15 years with many failures and heartbreaks, eventually discovered the cure for HIV/Aids. He did a magnificent ‘job.’
Or we could say, ‘After taking her in with his charm and good looks, Slick McStiff eventually cleaned out her bank account. He really did a job on her in relieving her of five million dollars.’
The vast majority of people in Jamaica have not read the Public Defender’s Report into the Tivoli and Keith Clarke killings and associated atrocities. To be fair, we should not expect them to because, one, we are not a reading country and two, we are a mostly verbal people, in terms of how we assimilate information and pass it on to our peers.
Even the poorest and least educated may be simple in certain assessments but they are hardly ever simplistic. Most have concluded that that a commission of inquiry would be a waste of time and money. Are they justified? Yes, based on what they have seen.
But does this mean that we should just give the residents of Tivoli Gardens a million dollars each and move on with our lives? Frankly it would be my choice to have the commission of inquiry plus the money payout. That would be the politically correct approach. Would that be the CORRECT approach? Not that simple.
One key element in Witter’s excellent report is probably being missed by many of our people who, with good reason, have written off this nation as an irredeemable rock where justice and truth are usually the casualties of the power relations between colluding branches of ‘the authorities’ and the people.
I’ve always maintained that many stories and events of note that are ‘bared’ to the public are a mix of contrivance, prevarication and the deliberate slipping in of one or two bits of the truth to make the whole palatable.
So, the public may not put it quite the way that I have termed it but they get it that the authorities are in it to cover their tracks and worse, lead any wrongdoing to an innocent person or just someone who happened to be at the right place at the wrong time among others who needed a most convenient fall-guy.
Our history is replete with that.
Witter states, ‘Most importantly however, Coke’s reputation of crime overlord and, his standing in the community; the long reach of his influence, his patina of benevolent protector of the poor, the political links and patronage which he may have enjoyed and, how all this may have led (inexorably) to the cataclysm of May, 2010, demands close forensic analysis and authoritative documentation.’
How many of us remember that political debate called the Politics of Crime carried on TV in 1997 I think. It included PJ Patterson, then prime minister, Eddie Seaga, then leader of the Opposition and Bruce Golding then President of the National Democratic Movement (NDM).
True to their automatic distancing of themselves from the evils of garrison politics, Eddie Seaga described garrison politics as ‘people of like mind’ or some such simplistic conclusion, probably designed to deflect from the painful reality. PJ Patterson told us that his constituency was way over there in the country so he knew nothing about anything.
Only Bruce Golding, with nothing to lose politically spoke of the links between criminality, the garrison and politics.
At the end of the ‘debate’ PJ and Seaga shook hands. Quite telling.
Journalists must be ever relentless to scrutinize those who will form the panel of commissioners. We cannot allow ‘authority’ to pull the wool over our eyes again.
We must never and we will not allow any commissioner to pat himself on the back in congratulating himself on having done a damn fine job for his political bosses.
The politicians, like quite a number of those making up powerful bodies in this country are very capable of unspeakable evil.
We must not allow them to have their way because we know they cannot be trusted to deliver on anyone else’s behalf than their own.
Sometimes we are just ‘this’ close to a tipping point and we will never know unless we go forward. The Tivoli Commission may just be that tipping point where we begin to make that clean break from our nasty past.
observemark@gmail.com
At some stage a man gained entry to the villa; we are told, through a window and removed valuable items such as smart-phones, cameras, laptops etc. In quick time, the items were recovered, the perpetrator uncovered and held, the man charged, brought to trial and sentenced to two years.
Even for a developed country that would have been considered the epitome of what justice should be. Swift, fair and decisive and, carried out before the eyes of the nation!
Last week, the Prime Minister’s brother was robbed and assaulted by men in the heart of downtown Kingston. It may just have been a wee bit slower than the proverbial ‘two shakes of a duck’s tail’ but in a matter of days a man was held and, we can be certain based on the cosmic speed given to Bunting’s matter that he will be put before the courts and dealt with in an even shorter time.
After all, Minister Peter Bunting may be a big boss but, Portia Simpson Miller, the Prime Minister is his boss and, she is the bigger boss.
Even if we should delude ourselves by pretending that we are all equal under the law, that when we elect our representatives, they are our servants and, among them, the Prime Minister is ‘first among equals,’ we really ought not to have a problem with wrongs perpetrated against our political leaders being dealt with in the swiftest possible time.
That is the ideal. Hopping on the back of this ideal should be the same attitude of the police and the courts system towards delivering justice to us, the lesser beings, who are now deemed more loathsome and unwashed than those in the political directorate and very definitely undeserving of the kind of justice dished out to those who caused minister Bunting and the prime minister a few sleepless nights.
We have been told that there are about 40,000 cases forming the backlog or, the clog hampering the speedy delivery of justice in this country. While I have not sought nor gathered any data or details about the mechanics which led to this backlog (incomplete files from the police, DPP, cases ‘lost’ in the system, people locked up and also ‘lost’ in the prisons, jails) it is known that our judges still take notes by hand and, there are not sufficient numbers of them.
One can only imagine the confusion in the back office in relation to the filing system, those overwhelmed by it and sheer difficulty of determining what must be placed on the roster tomorrow. To the poor man at street level, that should never be his concern but, he certainly well knows that once he or a member of his household is wronged, justice for him is like hitting the lucky Cashpot number. It is highly desirable but, it hardly ever happens.
The Prime Minister and our Security minister will have no such concerns because they know the reality of them being better than the rest of us.
They are also quite sure that we would want them, our supposed ‘servants’ to have what is denied to us because, well, that is how the poor and the idiotic routinely demean themselves while they lay prostrate before their masters.
In other words, Portia and Peter are more than a cut above the rest of us and, we should accept the fact that we will never, even as hope, get the sort of justice they received. The best that we can eke out for ourselves in brutish Jamaica is the opposite of what a man said to me years ago.
After he moved as a ‘country boy’ to town, he bought a bicycle, started selling goods from that bicycle, then rented a small shop on Maxfield Avenue. One shop grew to two and then there were three. The man started making ‘mad’ money, working 20 hour days and having a client list almost as long as the seconds in those hours.
Barely literate and highly trustful of two crooked bankers, the man was in a few years reduced to near penury and the little he had left was eaten away by lawyers all too eager to conspire with those on the other side. The bankers were found guilty but in a much more reduced form. They never served time and were eventually given soft paddling (fines) by the courts.
When all the parties were lined up, on one side were bankers, lawyers, an accountant from a co-operative and the ‘justice system.’ On the other side was this man who spoke a country man’s language and foolishly believed that even though his ways were simple, two bankers could actually be trusted with ‘signature rights’ on his business matters.
One day, a few years ago we sat down in my living room and as he spoke, my heart bled for him. The truth was, the ‘system’ was out in full array against him. Outside my gate was his beaten-up old van. Like him, it had seen better days.
‘Mr. Wignall, mi go uptown fi justice, mi go downtown fi justice and me can’t find justice. Remember now, mi neva go mid town.’
I didn’t quite catch the meaning of the ‘midtown’ justice. I was having a slow day.
‘Downtown an uptown a di court system. Midtown a di gunman, Mr. Wignall. Sometime dat is all di likkle man can resort to. Him can’t win wid di justice system.’
I am certain that those who deem themselves ‘honourable’ and allow the system to dub them in that fallacious cloak of hypocrisy are feeling quite good about themselves as they grow fat and feel safe on Animal Farm.
Miss Mattie’s daughter who was brutally raped and Mass Tom’s grandson who has been locked up for a year without charge will never know the sweet smell of justice. What they see and feel in an acute manner is that justice is only given to those who the robots vote for.
The more diehard among the robots will even deny their own the right to justice with, ‘If something nuh go so, it nearly go so.’ Hogwash!
That would be the local reprise of Occam’s razor which states that ‘among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.’
Justice however cannot be made on hypothesis neither can it be based on assumptions.
In Jamaica the general assumption is the that scared little man from ‘out a bush,’ while standing before a stern judge in a court of law may be not guilty of the crime for which he is being tried but, on some day, at some other place, he did some wrong, undetermined in scope but, since we have him here, let us put him away. Let us give him up to ’the crowd’ and thus, provide them with the palliative that justice has been done.
The Prime Minister and the minister of National Security are our bosses and, we are not even worthy of being considered ‘servants’ in good standing. They and their relatives will always be guaranteed justice but the servants can only celebrate vicariously as they dream of and wish for the real one which has been denied to them for too long.
Why we must be extremely vigilant on the Tivoli Commission of Inquiry
I have no idea if Mr. Emil George, Q.C, Chairman of the debacle that were the findings of the Manatt Commission, after retiring home the evening that the results were made public told himself that he had done a damn fine job.
If he did do so then someone needs to bring new definition to a few words and terms. We need to redefine ‘fine’ as in,
‘She is a fine looking woman. Almost as ‘damn fine’ as Chupski.’
Or,
‘After the divorce, he made friends with a barstool. He named it Cindy and for the next two years they struck up an intimate relationship. When we spoke, his hands could barely hold on to the glass of rum. They were unsteady and his lips were quivering. As I stared at him through the smoke, I could tell that he had allowed the mental anguish to do a ‘damn fine job’ on him.’
And then we need to reexamine ‘job.’ We could say that a scientist, ‘…after laboring for 15 years with many failures and heartbreaks, eventually discovered the cure for HIV/Aids. He did a magnificent ‘job.’
Or we could say, ‘After taking her in with his charm and good looks, Slick McStiff eventually cleaned out her bank account. He really did a job on her in relieving her of five million dollars.’
The vast majority of people in Jamaica have not read the Public Defender’s Report into the Tivoli and Keith Clarke killings and associated atrocities. To be fair, we should not expect them to because, one, we are not a reading country and two, we are a mostly verbal people, in terms of how we assimilate information and pass it on to our peers.
Even the poorest and least educated may be simple in certain assessments but they are hardly ever simplistic. Most have concluded that that a commission of inquiry would be a waste of time and money. Are they justified? Yes, based on what they have seen.
But does this mean that we should just give the residents of Tivoli Gardens a million dollars each and move on with our lives? Frankly it would be my choice to have the commission of inquiry plus the money payout. That would be the politically correct approach. Would that be the CORRECT approach? Not that simple.
One key element in Witter’s excellent report is probably being missed by many of our people who, with good reason, have written off this nation as an irredeemable rock where justice and truth are usually the casualties of the power relations between colluding branches of ‘the authorities’ and the people.
I’ve always maintained that many stories and events of note that are ‘bared’ to the public are a mix of contrivance, prevarication and the deliberate slipping in of one or two bits of the truth to make the whole palatable.
So, the public may not put it quite the way that I have termed it but they get it that the authorities are in it to cover their tracks and worse, lead any wrongdoing to an innocent person or just someone who happened to be at the right place at the wrong time among others who needed a most convenient fall-guy.
Our history is replete with that.
Witter states, ‘Most importantly however, Coke’s reputation of crime overlord and, his standing in the community; the long reach of his influence, his patina of benevolent protector of the poor, the political links and patronage which he may have enjoyed and, how all this may have led (inexorably) to the cataclysm of May, 2010, demands close forensic analysis and authoritative documentation.’
How many of us remember that political debate called the Politics of Crime carried on TV in 1997 I think. It included PJ Patterson, then prime minister, Eddie Seaga, then leader of the Opposition and Bruce Golding then President of the National Democratic Movement (NDM).
True to their automatic distancing of themselves from the evils of garrison politics, Eddie Seaga described garrison politics as ‘people of like mind’ or some such simplistic conclusion, probably designed to deflect from the painful reality. PJ Patterson told us that his constituency was way over there in the country so he knew nothing about anything.
Only Bruce Golding, with nothing to lose politically spoke of the links between criminality, the garrison and politics.
At the end of the ‘debate’ PJ and Seaga shook hands. Quite telling.
Journalists must be ever relentless to scrutinize those who will form the panel of commissioners. We cannot allow ‘authority’ to pull the wool over our eyes again.
We must never and we will not allow any commissioner to pat himself on the back in congratulating himself on having done a damn fine job for his political bosses.
The politicians, like quite a number of those making up powerful bodies in this country are very capable of unspeakable evil.
We must not allow them to have their way because we know they cannot be trusted to deliver on anyone else’s behalf than their own.
Sometimes we are just ‘this’ close to a tipping point and we will never know unless we go forward. The Tivoli Commission may just be that tipping point where we begin to make that clean break from our nasty past.
observemark@gmail.com