Peter Polack

The matter of punishment has become quite convoluted in the Caribbean, as in much of the rest of the world, especially in the USA. There, punishment has taken on a strange format in that there is no need to appeal because presidential pardons have become the status quo among many drug dealers, fraudsters, and even relatives.

Worse, punishment in many cases has become death sentences by presidential order—writ large in the maritime smuggler killings by the American government in circumstances where the same illegal drug corruption, as with the ex-president of Honduras, is pardoned.

Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

No investigation, judicial inquiry, factual inquiry, distinction between bales of weed or cocaine, sentencing or other formality—just cold, remote, explosive, death videos.

United States law enforcement must be confused by this duality of law, as in Jung’s writings, that there is no longer good and evil, only what the political leaders desire in the moment.

This may sound familiar in the post-Melissa disaster mess of Jamaica and so-called government remedies.

Even worse is the slow, ancient system of justice, the subject of much historical complaint, being exchanged for a system of fast or immediate faux justice.

The judges will soon be out of a job.

A few years later, there will be an explosion of Nuremberg-like trials, followed by a chorus of “just following orders” or “doing my job” from the accused, who will not be saved by pardons.

The recurring circumstances where perhaps the punishment has not fit the crime—whether the shooting of wives during an argument or political leaders dragging out integrity investigations or breaches of procurement rules—have been part and parcel of our system of justice ineptness for hundreds of years.

We own it. Do not blame the messenger or judge.

Politicians should be banned from complaining about crime and punishment when the only rules apparently are that there are no rules. Not for the rich, the poor, the unevenly represented or sentenced. A reflection of the current rule by power.

The young man in the street with a gun, of which there is no shortage, is not oblivious to, but encouraged by this.

Whether killed or imprisoned, he is holding up a mirror to every single one of us.

There but for the grace of God go I.

A cursory review of the sentences handed out for a myriad of crimes—from child rape, incest, violence, home invasion, fraud or financial manipulation—does not appear to discriminate between them in any way that the layman can comprehend. In many Latin American countries, the murder of wives or partners has garnered a new category, femicide, that, as with attacks on government employees, is often specially and vigorously punished.

There is no femicide in the Caribbean, just brutal violence against women.

This “do as I say, not as I do” conspiracy is best demonstrated by the United Kingdom colony of the Cayman Islands, where citizens of that predominantly black country are punished in a much more severe manner for nearly all offenses than their predominantly white British overlords. This also extends to the expungement of criminal records in the same way.

The new system of summary capital punishment introduced by the Americans may soon extend to the Caribbean, starting with Trinidad first.

Their population has stood mute in the face of idiocy.

Little can be said by the countries of the Caribbean that have allowed ancient punishment, disparity of punishment, and the ignoring of femicide to persist.

People in glass houses and all that.

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.