Stupid police force, stupid magistrates in a stupid country

Jul 09, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Once you live in this country, its comical nature makes you feel we are the most asinine land on Planet Earth. In the space of one week, the Guyanese people learned we got more Judges and UG will get a top class scholar as its Vice-Chancellor. Do you see the irony?
If UG needs erudite minds to run it then the Judiciary needs such minds too. No one can complain about the learned scholar who is likely to be the next Vice-Chancellor of UG. I went to UG the same time Professor Ivelaw Griffith was a student there. Griffith is indeed an excellent find for UG. I am not sure elevating Magistrates nationally known for their intellectual bareness into Judges makes sense.
If any Guyanese wants to see how important and powerful Judges are, then they should Google the court cases between the Opposition and the PPP Government between 2011 until the change of government in May this year, and from May to the present time.
Here are some examples of how powerful a Judge is in Guyana. A Judge injuncted the swearing in of Janet Jagan as President but Jagan tossed away the court papers. Another Judge ruled that the 1997 election was not conducted in accordance with the provisions of the Representation of the Peoples Act.
That very Judge also said that the election was not conducted according to the law because of the introduction of ID cards, but the government survived because of the doctrine of necessity cited by the very Judge. How interesting! She declared the election was not consistent with the law then she declared that the government can continue in office.
And a Judge will have to decide if the 2015 election was legal because the PPP filed an election petition. Guyana has seen a court case where a Judge stopped the DPP from charging a Police Commissioner with rape. These examples show the enormous scope a High Court Judge possesses.
It follows logically then that Judges must be of the highest intellectual caliber. Should a Magistrate be made a Judge within the peculiar context of what takes place in Guyana? First, the Chancellor and other high-ranking Judicial officials have said several times that low pay is a disincentive for the Magistracy to attract quality lawyers. You can deconstruct or psychoanalyze those words how much you want, the meaning is simple – the Magistracy does not receive learned lawyers because they will not work for a small salary.
Secondly, you examine the Magistrates in the entire territory of Guyana and you find one factor common among them – intellectual mediocrity. Are we then going to take that quality and elevate them to the High Court? Most Magistrates in this country have a punitive mentality. This makes a mockery of justice and exposes in the most graphic way, the class basis of justice.
Magistrates punish poor people by assigning enormous bail to them knowing that they would be unable to raise such huge sums. Magistrates are filling up the remand system and they are all poor people, especially young men found with marijuana cigarettes.
Take the latest case of a Magistrate that put a hotel owner and his barman on bail for using one of the rooms for the purpose of prostitution. Surely, our silly police force has plenty of time on their hands. They can’t stop crime but want to stop prostitution.
I will follow this case to see how a conviction can be obtained. Reminds me of Minister Broomes who took her broom to Bartica and swept a hotel looking for traffickers in person, but ended up arresting and charging women for over-staying their time. In other words, the women were suspected of prostitution.
But what is wrong with prostitution? It is illegal in Guyana but so is open homosexual behaviour, but Mr. Bryan Hunt, the Chargé d’Affaires of the US Embassy, is asking the Government to consider legalization of same sex marriage. This is a funny, stupid country. Same sex marriage can be debated but prostitution is a serious crime.

I wonder if Broomes will take her broom outside of St. George’s Cathedral in the night looking for male prostitutes. How does the broom lady feel about legalization of same sex marriage? I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with legalization of prostitution. One of my philosophical beliefs is that the most aesthetically attractive value in nature in general is the beauty of a woman’s body. It is no concern of the state how she wants to use her body. The argument for prostitution is the same for abortion – a woman’s right to her body.