Is Annette Singh the only sane magistrate?

Feb 11, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

By now, any consistent reader of this column would know how I feel about the magistracy. Most of them I believe are irrational with their sentencing policies and bail assignments, and have harmed the future of countless youths that have appeared in front of them. But most of all, I believe that a dead society has allowed these jejune magistrates to perpetuate judicial lawlessness, because society has failed to denounce their judicial rampage.
A recent ruling of Magistrate Ann McLennan was horrid. This magistrate ordered that twelve Nepalese men must remain in the police lock-up until the state deports them back to Nepal. They had been languishing in the lock-up for two months until freed last week by the High Court. (The magistrate did say police custody).
The court ruled she had no such authority to keep them in the police lock-up. If the state couldn’t find time and money to effect their deportation, the Nepalese could have found themselves prisoners for life. But why didn’t she request the state to keep them at a hotel? Why the police lock-up?
I hope Magistrate Annette Singh doesn’t disappoint whatever decent and hopeful people that are left in this wasteland of a country named Guyana. (I plan to write a novel titled “Wasteland of Ironies,” which will be like “The Sly Company of People Who Care” based on my frequent encounters as a media practitioner with all types of Guyanese people).
This magistrate sensibly and decently put a teenager on $5000 bail for uttering a fake Guyanese note. This girl needs to hang a photo of Ms. Singh in her house. If it were most other magistrates, that bail would have been $100,000. Unable to raise it, she would have been in the remand and would have become a broken girl with a destroyed future.
Whenever I write about magistrates, I think of the incident with Magistrate Geeta Chandan-Edmond. It was alleged that Ms. Chandan and husband assaulted their babysitter after the couple accused the caregiver of hitting the infant. Wherever the truth lies, the fact is that the couple was incensed at what they believed to be cruel mistreatment of the baby.
Surely mothers must be equally pained as Ms. Chandan was when they sit in court and see their children marched off to the Camp Street remand after failing to raise the assigned $200,000 bail for larceny of a bicycle worth $10,000. Surely mothers must be traumatized when their sons’ lives are destroyed by these magistrates for the mere possession of a marijuana cigarette.
Magistrate Judy Latchman, on January 26, 2015, sentenced Ocia Leung to three years’ imprisonment for possession of cocaine, which according to the Stabroek News report was worth $10,000. Ms. Leung has four very young children, including a two-week-old baby. This is such an uncivilized nation that apart from a letter by Red Thread not one politician, civil society leader, feminist organization, youth organization uttered even one word of condemnation against this bestial sentence.
I have written several times that I believe Magistrate Judy Latchman’s decisions need to be investigated. I have her before the Judicial Service Commission and I haven’t heard a word from that body as yet.
Why has no one questioned the judicial conduct of this magistrate and others like Sueanna Lovell in the Berbice Court (see my column of Feb 19, 2014, “A Guyana Tragedy: Magistrates Nurse and Lovell.”)? What could have gone through the mind of Ms. Lovell when she sentenced a young Amerindian caregiver to five years in jail for physically hurting the baby in her care? That is extremely harsh.
Magistrate Sherdel Isaacs jailed a teenager for leaving Guyana illegally for Suriname. She went with a speedboat, which Guyanese have been doing since the beginning of the 20th century. After I wrote about Lovell, I was shown her public Facebook page. The page is replete with Christian prayers and Christian quotations.
Something is wrong with God. I don’t mean to hurt the feelings of religious people, but I often wondered how God operates. If Lovell is a child of God, then surely Lovell must know that her sentencing policy is cruel and God would punish her. Vreed-en-Hoop Magistrate, Clive Nurse, has his own church on Norton Street, in the district into which I was born – Wortmanville. I plan to attend one of his sermons very soon.
I hope the sanest of the lot in the magistracy, Annette Singh, does not follow in the terrible footsteps of her contemporaries. God is watching her.

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Is Annette Singh the only sane magistrate?

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