It is criminal to ignore some necessary requests

Mar 26, 2019 Editorial

After 36 years in prison an innocent man is set free. It did not have to be this long. All that was required was for those who have such authority to give the man a listening, and giving him a chance. A chance to prove his innocence. Except that they prosecutors in Baton Rouge, LA did not. That should be a crime. (NY Times article dated March 22nd and titled, “He spent 36 years in prison. Fingerprint database cleared him”).
It should be a crime to extend–so carelessly, so thoughtlessly–what amounted to another 20 years in the hell of jail at the expense of the liberty and reputation of an innocent man for he had asked as early as 1999. Denied.
What effort was required? What harm could come other than the justice of exoneration? Or guilt confirmed? Case closed. What was called for was for prosecutors to seek a comparison and match against the national fingerprint database. They did not.
It should be a crime when officers of the state wield the power of the state, misuse it actually–sometimes mistakenly, sometimes deliberately–to delay and thwart and undermine. Sabotage is a stronger word, a more familiar one.
Why not give a chance to a man insisting on an opportunity to prove his innocence? Who screams to the world, that part which would listen and care: I am wronged. I am victimized. That was the ignored cry of a man accused of felony rape and stabbing.
That context allows for a timely segue into GECOM and its now apparently shoddy and tawdry way of going about its personnel business. White collar abuses are no less insidious; they rise beyond mere misdemeanors. Discrimination in any form by anyone is not simply condemnable; it has to be cursed.
The matter of the former Deputy Chief Elections Officer is a case of continued denial: no questions allowed, no answers forthcoming, no documents presented. Looks ugly. Smells pungently. And now, it is both of those things and the worst conclusions.
The grounds on which the man was removed seem shaky. What are the real grounds? Comfort level? Strategic visions and plans? A better way could have been found to get rid of him; to ease him out to pasture; to bridge toward the desired transition.
The benefit of the doubt as to the uncorroborated subjective (shifty and the rest) no longer applies. Mischief was afoot and leaves the door open for any manner of conjecture to follow.
In view of what has unfolded before that visit by members of the Ethnic Relations Commission, and what subsequently unraveled, there is only the scurrilous and racially treacherous that can be ascribed; the dirtiest possible motives. This is neither constructive nor comforting for an institution as sensitive, as suspected, as alternately scorned and savored as the Guyana Elections Commission. Its history speaks; its present dumbfounds.
In the political Guyana of today, the shoe is on one foot of the divide. The promise is that as these cycles come and go, that same shoe would find a similarly perfect fit on another foot, one that is just as accommodating, but no less inimical to whatever morsel of racial progress may be attainable in this deboned nation.
Unfortunately, the 360 circles of partisan dissonance and the societally destructive continue unabated. As in all 360-degree revolutions, it is back to the same place from which started. Guyana’s ordeal is endless and timeless.
Obscuring and stonewalling and mystifying should be made violations of the law under those circumstances of grave injustice, of aggravated personal grievances inflicted.

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