The Editor, AMANDALA
Dear Sir,
It seems the more things change, the more they remain the same. My notes below are as relevant now as when they were written.
BLOOD MONEY
February 22, 2004
What’s the point?
Our justice system is no doubt considered admirable and indeed wonderful if you’re a guilty person standing on the accused side of the law, and having your day in court. Indeed, our system lives up fully to the motto of “innocent until proven guilty”. How else could you explain the cool, almost respectable appearance of accused persons, shades and all, when going to court to defend against some of the most heinous and heartless crimes our country has seen. Bet your last dollar, they will have their full hearing, and if there arises some technicality of law, and they have a decent lawyer, why, they will probably walk free.
That has been the scenario in too many instances in recent times. And the crime situation seems, despite remonstrations to the contrary from official circles, not to be getting better, or at least not fast enough for a fearful public. A millionaire heiress is gunned down in broad daylight, but insufficient proof and the accused “walks”. All well and good for the justice system. But nobody else gets charged, so a killer (or killers) is/are free out there.
Murder case witnesses are eliminated too frequently nowadays, it seems, and, as long as the evidence is not completely air tight, with new witnesses willing to present themselves, the accused walks free on a technicality. If you are the accused, guilty in your heart or innocent, you sing praises for our justice system. But the net result of all this is that these violent crimes continue, and get more “bold faced”.
Crime is a problem in any society, and close and shut cases of sensational, individual crimes of passion, revenge, anger or simply money are becoming much too commonplace. Keeping pace with this alarmingly high crime rate seems to be taxing our law enforcement people to their limits, and it is in this circumstance that I wonder if their resources are too limited to deal with another level of crime that seems to be going on without obstruction.
It is not nice in our little society, or any society, when you feel that your life is in danger, and the Police are either un-caring or unwilling to direct their resources in preventing your execution. A brother I knew, who was having disputes with another party, was eliminated in broad daylight by a complete stranger. This, less than a week after I advised him to go to the Police and report that an early morning cycle ride was frighteningly disrupted as a car chased him and tried to run him over in the City near the Belchina Bridge, and a few days after receiving reports of threats on his life. The Police sat on his application for a firearms licence to try and protect himself. One week later he was a dead man. The trigger man was found guilty and is behind bars. End of story.
When will our law enforcement authorities come to terms with the fact (or have they?) that for well over a decade, perhaps following the tremendous influx of refugees from war-torn Central America in the mid-eighties, the arrival of crack cocaine, and/or with the U.S. policy of deporting Belizean citizens when released from their jail cells in the States, that there has been a thriving business of contract killings in little Belize? Perhaps their hands are too full with the long list of unsolved crimes and missing persons; or they are too devoted to the war on drugs. But something should be said to the fact that a number of cases are simply a matter of killing for hire, and no mention is made of any investigation into finding the “behind the scenes” perpetrators who prey on the desperation and ignorance of the “boys on the base”. Once the trigger man is caught, he may or may not be convicted, but, whichever the outcome, that’s where it ends. Until he gets another job.
Apologists for our system keep patting themselves on the back each time they send another young man to prison for robbery, murder or selling drugs. The pattern is too worrying to be simply accepted as indiscipline, lack of home training or laziness. It is almost all poor, black young men that are filling our prison. They don’t make drugs or guns, and they don’t have the liquidity to be putting contracts on other people’s lives. They are criminals, yes, but is it because they are also victims and pawns, being used and discarded by bigger people, who the authorities are either un-concerned or un-willing to pursue in their investigations?
Could it be that they, the law enforcers, are themselves fearful for their lives and/or livelihood; are they involved, or are they simply blind? If either is the case, then the words of Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” would be more than appropriate when he said, “Justice, thou are fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason”.
We know we are slipping down the slope to a Police state when citizens can’t say certain things about certain people for fear of their very lives. And when some men in uniform are quite untrustworthy; in fact, even dangerous.
Sincerely,
Charles X