FOR years I have been a staunch supporter of the death penalty because the Bible supports it and that settles it for me. The Biblical injunction that states a man who takes away one of my eyes I should in turn pluck out one of his pure and simple.

Why should I suffer having one eye while the one who has done me harm go on with his life having two eyes? He should suffer the same fate too. However, over the years I’ve had to struggle with the question of whether that person was judged fairly.

Like the blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice was there a fair system of justice administered to the accused with a fair form of punishment.

I must admit that I could not come up with a clear cut answer to that question. You see even in the Biblical dispensation of theocracy justice as we know it did not always have an even keel and could have been perverted for various reasons.

It is no different today equity and impartiality are nebulous, oftentimes illusionary phrases when it comes to the justice system. What I am saying is one’s innocence or guilt should not, I repeat should not, be determined by the amount of money he/she has in the bank or by his race or greater still what political affiliation one adheres to.

Here is where the rubber hits the road and much of what passes for justice in Guyana is based on the foregoing factors and for the above reasons I became a convert to the life imprisonment camp of thinkers.

However, I must make it abundantly clear that I am not a supporter of the human rights movement which renders instantaneous outpouring of sympathy for the guilty criminal with little or no regard for the feelings of those who have suffered loss of friend or family.

Criminals should bear the consequences of their actions, however severe that punishment is. On this note I believe the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme based on the facts that we see unfolding before us.

Sentencing for capital offences is becoming lighter and lighter every day in some cases the criminal walks scotch free. One glaring example stands out in the decisions made a judge in his depraved interpretation of “fairness” looks for every possible way in getting the criminal off the hook.

He employs every technicality in the book to set the accused free. Two cases-there may be more – readily come to mind. The first involves Sean Yaw in the Dairy Bar murder trial, that case never reached the jury because this judge concluded that the police conducted a sloppy investigation and the eyewitness in turn was given a lecture that she did not see what she saw that night and it was a matter of mistaken identity. That case ended in a dismissal of the case against Sean Yaw.

Recently, Elroy Tores was set free then rearrested for the murder of Elizabeth Hutson again the same judge was on the bench. In this case the judge concluded that mistakes were made by the magistrate in the lower court which now affords Tores an entirely new trial.

From my knowledge of the law as time passes memory fades and with the ramifications involved in court Tores might as well consider himself a free man. The point is the judge does not know when to end a sick joke as these decisions of his are unacceptable and the people of Guyana need to take him up on this.

Persons are losing their lives in the most brutal circumstances and here we have a judge having all the pleasantries for the accused without a care in the world for the friends or families of those who were murdered. I think this judge is looking for the perfect case, something that never happens in the real world, because the criminal out there is always looking for innovative ways to commit crime.

This coupled with the sentiment of a so called “fair and humane” judge, criminals are indeed having a field day with the justice system in Guyana.

It is my opinion that this judge has a gripe be it with the police, politics or race or a combination of the above for some of these decisions he has come up with. I wish he comes clean to the public on this note.