By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

Nickolas DaCosta, the beleaguered Minister of Home Affairs in the Cayman Islands recently crowed about the achievement of 23 Caymanians having their criminal records expunged in 2024. This is both ridiculous and laughable for a country of nearly 100,000 people, but still more than his recent promotion in the Freemason lodge.

That Stone Age theory on expungement demands a repetition of the please sir plea by Oliver as opposed to the sensible automatic correction of decades old wrongs. The people of the Cayman Islands did vote for the legalization of ganja but mother England has not allowed it.

Over ten years ago, then Jamaican Minister of Justice,Mark Golding, declared the automatic expungement of minor marijuana offences. Antigua has recently announced it too will take this path. This directive from the space age and empire of light will benefit thousands of citizens in the Caribbean, Jamaica and Antigua. Non automatic expungement in the Cayman Islands will only affect less than 30 a year and about 200 since inception, years ago.

A freedom of information release in the Cayman Islands in 2015 stated that 20% of the Cayman Islands had a criminal conviction. This must have escaped the attention of Nickolas DaCosta, that over ten thousand voters, more now probably, would need expungement. At the current rate, his expungement board would require 300 years plus to allow Caymanians to be free of that millstone.

The new grey list that damages thousands.

Perhaps it suits some of the powers that be for the downtrodden to beseech a future at a limited rate requiring The Man to approve when society has already said enough. Similar to the unreasonable diversion of resources reply to freedom of information requests, it is a disingenuous way of preventing oversight, read advancement.

The obsolete Cayman expungement theory prevents the many from joining the few.

Legalize it, expunge it.

Stone Age to Space Age.

Notes

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. 

His views are his own.