The Oxymoronic manslaughter sentence: Comical yet evil

Apr 09, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Every country has stupid people. But some nations produce stupid people at a faster rate than others. Heading the list has to be Guyana. I read a letter in the newspapers where people are complaining about a one-year sentence for two Haitians that entered Guyana illegally.
The people who wrote that letter have to be silly souls that you must laugh at. Why would a magistrate sentence two CARICOM nationals to one year in jail? The answer is obvious if you have been living in Guyana for the past 30 years and you are not a foolish person. There can be no logical reason for such a sentence.
The answer is the nature of the magistrates that work in Guyana. If you research the nature of the magistracy here, you will find far weirder sentences over a 20-year period that make the one-year imposition on the two Haitians look like extreme generosity.
This is Guyana, a dystopian, irrational, psychotic land that appears to normal people in the world to be the world’s most curious aberration. No one in authority in Guyana is interested in looking at the disturbing conduct of magistrates. In countries with large and small populations, the type of magistrates we have will never, and I emphasize never be tolerated.
In which country you will find the following examples. Kwame McCoy, Jason Abdulla and Shawn Hinds were charged with assaulting me. At the trial, Magistrate Judy Latchman referred to a column of mine in which I produced the lyrics of one of my favourite songs, “Hotel California.” Then Ms. Latchman recited the lyrics in open court. To this day, I cannot understand the relevance of her recitation to the trial.
Magistrate Ann McLennan, a few years back, fined a woman for trafficking in persons when the law imposes mandatory imprisonment. But guess what? The government which has the legal authority to investigate the magistrate issued a press statement denouncing the fine. That was the end of that. If I were to go to my file and produce columns I did on the weird sentencing of Guyana’s magistrates and judges, it will take up the remaining space. I have done about a dozen articles analyzing the incredibly frightening incongruities in court sentencing. The portrait is still alive as readers can see from the case of the two Haitians.
Here is immense stupidity on display at the moment. At the time of writing, a convict, Rondell Bacchus, is being held for questioning in the murder of Roger Khan’s associate, Ricardo Fagundes. He was charged for murder in 2008 for robbing and killing a businessman. He was sentenced in May 2019 but was released in October of the same year.
There are mounting queries and anger as to how he could be released so early. You have to be an ignorant person whose empty-headedness disqualifies you from being part of modern society in asking that question. He robbed and murdered a businessman in 2008. He pleaded guilty to murder which automatically becomes manslaughter.
In Guyana, it is very rare to get more than 10 years for any kind of heinous homicide once a guilty plea is entered into. Those who want to know how Bacchus was released need to understand the inexplicable manslaughter sentence in this land. It is one of the most horrible anomalies when compared to the judicial system in other countries.
People can torture their victims to death using extreme violence, can literally dismember their victim in the most bestial ways and at the trial plead guilty to murder and get 10 years. What is demented about this sentencing structure is that 10 years is not 10 years because in Guyana under the penal code, a year is nine months.
Make no mistake; Bacchus’ sentence was not irregular in the pattern of manslaughter trials. Why then such an idiotic question about his early release? Do you know in February 2019, a man killed another human and was sentenced to three years after he told the judge he became annoyed when he was taunted?
Now a week before he received his three-year sentence, Magistrate Leron Daly sentenced a School of the Nation student to three years for possession of five grams of ecstasy pills. Daly is still on the bench dishing out daily recipes but not the recipe for McArthur’s Park which is a cake that forms the title of a great love song. For more of Guyana’s psychotic sentencing structure, see my column of Tuesday, February 26, 2019, “These magistrates’ decisions must be condemned.” In the eyes of the judiciary, a mango thief is more dangerous than a vicious killer.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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