Dear Editor,
I can only hope that citizens are taking advantage of the column offered by the Bar Association each Sunday in your newspaper. Indeed I have found it most informative; it has increased my confidence in my ability to deal with the justice system, if I ever have need to. In its offering in your newspaper of October 30, 2011, the Bar Association did a piece on plea bargaining. This is a rather important provision that citizens need to be acquainted with. Plea bargaining offers accused persons a possible alternative, if for whatever reason they would prefer not to stand trial. However I think there are a couple of extremely important things about plea bargaining that were not covered at all, or not adequately dealt with, in the article referred to above.
First, a positive spin-off of this provision for the ordinary citizen is that if properly used it could spare first offenders from experiencing harsh punishment, say imprisonment, which could serve as their initiation to a life of crime. An American writer did give us a good example of how this might work. Imagine an end-of-school party for children attending secondary school.
This party will be the last time these children are sure of being able to meet as a group. A young man, outstanding at class work, mannerly and a good prospect to do his family and the nation proud in the future, is caught up in the moment.
In an attempt to make this occasion a memorable one, he buys a small portion of drugs from the boys at the corner, so that he and his small group of friends could really have a shared moment to remember. On his way to the party he is stopped and searched by the police and the drugs found. He is charged with trafficking of an illegal substance. By way of the plea bargaining arrangements, he might be able to plead guilty on a lesser count of possession of an illegal substance and possibly be placed on probation. Otherwise if the initial charge stands he would be, on being found guilty, imprisoned for a mandatory period.
Thus, somewhat unnecessarily, he could possibly become a hard-core criminal, all because he is thrown into prison and placed among hard-core criminals, for at best, ill-advised behaviour.
On the negative side however plea bargaining usually prevents citizens from knowing all they might want to about a certain crime. It is this tendency of the plea bargaining arrangements that most of those studying the justice system have expressed a concerned about. For example Roger Khan, if he did not accept a plea bargain arrangement, under cross examination at trial a lot of the questions still left unanswered would have been answered. In short, the plea bargaining mechanism could leave citizens uninformed about matters that have seriously damaged the spirit of the nation and for which both the families of those killed and the nation at large need closure. In fact, Anderson and Newman in their book Criminal Justice, writing on this very issue had this to say, “A simple plea of guilty to the charge does not satisfy the public’s need (some say ‘right‘) to know all the facts.”
With these considerations it would seem to me, that while plea bargaining would bring the benefits mentioned by the Bar Association, as a people we need to ask ourselves if the arrangements, as used in the USA; would satisfy our needs here in Guyana, or if there is need for some tweaking.
Yours faithfully,
Claudius Prince
