You would have to be some breed of sheep if you sat by while murders in your country went from 10 per year to 120 and 130 and 140. If that happened over a five-year period, we would have taken to the streets, and if our leaders did not come up with a satisfactory response, the police would have had to protect them when they went to House meetings to waste the people’s time with cheap theater and Cabinet bills supported just by the ruling party.
We know that saafli, saafli taiga kech monki, and that is how it happened that a country that once boasted to the world that it was peaceful and had a constructive democracy turned into one of the most murderous nations on the earth. Over the three or four decades during which we sank into this murderous state, there have been questions asked of our leaders, and for a time opposition parties seeking to form the government promised in their political manifestos to address the problem.
They took turns promising us that the country under their leadership would have less crime. Neither of them dare make such promises anymore, for they both had opportunities to restore respect for human life and limb in the country, and proved impotent.
At times when we sank to the lowest depths, when the murdered have been the very young, and women, there have been prayer vigils, and protest marches through the streets. The Chinese grocers have shut down their shops when they couldn’t take anymore. There have been periods of peace, but they never last long. The violence goes on and on and on.
In the old days in Belize a hangman’s rope was dropped around the neck of nearly everyone who was charged with murder. It appeared that if the police thought they had a case against you, you were found guilty. Of course some innocent people were hung, in all parts of the world, and it is because some innocent people were hung that people who considered themselves more civilized than the rest, came together and passed a law against capital punishment.
They really shouldn’t have bothered to ask us to ignore the capital punishment law in Belize, because almost no one is ever found guilty in court. The only people who are found guilty are those who have a death wish. These ones don’t care to put up much of a defense when they are brought to court. Unfortunately for them, the court doesn’t even consider their wish, to be hung, because all the sentences from the court are jail sentences.
Ah, we can’t ignore that there was an argument forwarded that capital punishment was unfair because only the poor went to the gallows. White people, and rich black people, like the American OJ Simpson, could afford the best lawyers, and if you got a good lawyer yu gaan klayr. Only the poor were guilty. That was a good point to sell for ending the death penalty, but of course, it is irrelevant now. Everyone, yes, the poor too, are innocent, if they claim so.
There are arguments that most people who commit murder are worthy of rehabilitation, because it was a bad childhood or a deprived state that led them to depreciate human life. There is an excuse for the rich when they turn killers too. In the US a mad boy who got drunk and mowed down four people with a vehicle was acquitted of his manslaughter crimes because he grew up too rich – his lawyer, must be his lawyer, said he was suffering from a vicious disease called affluenza.
We can have discussions for years, we have been having discussions for years, about why people become murderers, but no one has been bold enough to say it is not the worst crime. Murder is the only crime for which a person cannot get forgiveness from the wounded party, because the murdered don’t live in our world anymore.
Most of us understand that the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament is figurative—not a word-for- word account of how the world began, but we 100% believe in its lessons, that just as these lessons were, when written 6,000 years ago, they are now, never changing. Cain killed Abel and Abel’s blood cried out from the soil; the earth cried out for vengeance.
It might be argued that the conscience of the man who commits cold-blooded murder will haunt him, but you really have to be ambitious to think you know what goes on inside another person’s head. There are people who don’t give a daam about others. We know that, because we haven’t forgotten that the Europeans thought we were not human beings.
In 2018 there were 113 murders in Sweden, a country of over 10 million people. There were 915 murders in Japan in 2018, a country of over 126 million people. Those countries remind us of when we were a peaceful, constructive democracy. It is too great a source of shame to mention the number of murders in our little country in 2018 in the same paragraph with the statistics of those civilized nations.
The blindfolded lady with the scales knows that justice must be done, and we all know that when this is done, it must be seen. The family and friends of a murdered man will harbor revenge, even if they say it is behind them. When people say they leave the matter to God, they are just saying that the state is a failure, and they know that if they take revenge, such an act will just be perpetuating a Hatfield and McCoy situation.
All of us want the murdering in our little country to stop, and that won’t happen if we don’t do anything. The state cares little about the blood of the common people, but when an attempt was made on the life of an important lawyer, the state introduced trial without jury in some cases. Trial without jury has won some victories for the state over the defense lawyers, in select cases.
Janus, a former columnist for the Amandala, proposed in his “New Jurisprudence”, that the state and the defense should work together on murder cases. The way it is presently set up (as far as I know), the state and the defense are made aware of the evidence that both sides will present at trial, but in the courtroom it is adversarial, with the defense lawyers trying to play Perry Mason, trying to show up the case presented by the state, and the state’s agents, who operate within much tougher boundaries than the defense lawyers, trying/struggling to keep their witnesses from having amnesia or actually going over to the other side.
I have suggested that there be three verdicts in murder cases: one, a clear-cut acquittal; two, a clear- cut guilty verdict; and three, a declaration of the defendant’s innocence, while acknowledging there is some doubt, or a declaration of the defendant’s guilt, with the acknowledgement that there are unanswered questions. Those of us who are “convicted” of the third would be placed in a non-max prison, where we would be treated as human beings, have conjugal rights, and all those fine things. The state should staff a new department with a battery of lawyers —there is no shortage of lawyers in Belize —who would continue to study the cases until there is a clear-cut determination.
The state must stop allowing murder to go unpunished, because that encourages, fosters an environment that is conducive to crime. Our state isn’t doing nearly enough. They rejected Janus’s “New Jurisprudence”, they rejected my proposal, and they introduced a very selective trial without jury. We are a country in a difficult battle to contain a dangerous disease, and we can’t afford to have this crime adding to our troubles.
They don’t want Janus’s recommendations, they don’t want mine, their selective trial by judge is shaky, and they are impotent. I think the only response left for us is to reverse the law regarding assumed innocence in cases of murder.
Let the accused prove their innocence. Let the defense lawyers put on the shoes of our prosecutors who live di get wap by technicalities that force them into the disgraceful nolle pros. Of course, forcing the lawyers to prove their clients’ innocence might not change the results, but we have to try.