Editorial | Murder penalties doubtful

The Government’s latest tough-on-crime posture, exemplified in the bills Delroy Chuck took to Parliament last week to ensure longer mandatory prison sentences for murder convicts and the amount of time they must serve before parole, is probably very popular.

But, as much as this newspaper hopes that Mr Chuck, the justice minister, has at last discovered the magic bullet, the measures are unlikely, without more, to have any real deterrent effect on crime, including murders. The statistics support this view.

The point is that criminal penalties, never mind how tough they are, aren’t by themselves deterrents. The first job has to be to solve the crimes, arrest the perpetrators, and then convict them in a court of law. Jamaica isn’t good at that.

We, of course, understand the motivation behind Mr Chuck’s – and, by extension, the Government’s – initiative. For decades, Jamaica has endured an epidemic of crime, especially homicides. Each year, around 1,500 people are murdered. Its murder rate of over 50 per 100,000 is, as Mr Chuck said in the memorandum to his bills, among the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“... The adverse impact on domestic safety and security, the reputational damage to Jamaica therefrom and, by extension, the impact on the country’s gross domestic product (crime, by some estimates, costs about five per cent of GDP annually) warrants a distinct approach and necessitates penalties that are especially punitive,” Minister Chuck wrote.

HARSHENING OF SENTENCING

The upshot: the harshening of sentencing regime for murder.

While no execution has taken place in Jamaica since 1988, a person convicted for what law considers the most egregious forms of murder, such as killing a member of the security forces because of their job or eliminating a court witness, can be the sentence of death. Or, in a range of circumstances, it may be an “imprisonment for life, or such other term as the court considers appropriate, not less than 15 years”.

Under the proposal before Parliament, that minimum sentence would move to 45 years.

At present, if a person pleads guilty to an offence for which, if he had been tried and convicted, the sentence would have been life in jail, the judge, in calculating the sentence discount for the guilty plea, starts with the assumption that life means 30 years. Under Mr Chuck’s proposal, for that guilty plea to a murder charge, the judge would begin the discount based on a 50-year term – the new definition of life. For offences other than murder, the implied life sentence would be 40 years.

With respect to paroles, a murder convict is currently eligible for release after not less than 15 years. For other homicides, the minimum period is 10 years before parole. Under the new law, if passed, the minimum periods before parole would be 40 and 35 years, respectively.

The bottom line: under the new regime, no one who pleads guilty or is convicted of murder would be sentenced to less than 30 years.

“We want to send that message to persons who are contract killers, persons who are engaged in domestic abuse, and persons who can’t control themselves … that, if you do inflict a killing, you could remain in jail for a long time,” Mr Chuck said. “It is very important that this Parliament sends a message across every nook and cranny of Jamaica, because Jamaica is tired, tired of the murders and violent crimes.”

While we, like Mr Chuck, hope the criminals will get the message and desist, that isn’t likely to be the case, unless there is the example of people being caught and actually suffering the penalties.

WELL BEHIND

However, Jamaica‘s annual clear-up rate for murders, according to police statistics, hovers at around 50 per cent, well behind its global peers. Indeed, the deputy commissioner of police for crime, Fitz Bailey, recently put the figure clear-up rate at 49 per cent in 2022. Some analysts believe that the police data might overstate their effectiveness, on the basis that the constabulary sometimes marks as cleared-up murders they attribute to gang feuds and reprisals, without solid evidence of who specifically were behind the killings.

What perhaps is more concerning is what happens, in cases that, having been investigated, actually reach to court. The outcomes aren’t particularly encouraging.

In 2021, the latest period for which full-year statistics are available, overall criminal convictions in the Home Circuit Court, based on charges, was 22.3 per cent – 139 guilty outcomes from 623 charges.

Further, of 125 murder cases, there were 26 guilty outcomes, either by convictions or guilty pleas. Stated differently, the conviction rate for murders in 2021 was 20.8 per cent. The converse of that is that 79 per cent of the accused were acquitted.

There were convictions in only 10 per cent of the 52 rape cases, and nine per cent of those (57) for the illegal possession of firearm. The ratios for grievous sexual assault were 5.5 and 4.5 per cent, respectively. Clearly, these statistics will worsen when the current and historic cases that are not cleared up are taken into account.

The conviction rates suggest that police investigators and prosecutors aren’t making their cases stick. These are not the ratios that are likely to represent a critical mass for the new penalties to be real deterrents.

The fact is, Jamaica’s crime epidemic isn’t, because penalties aren’t tough enough. Some of the factors are difficult and complex and the fixes will require hard grind. But, clearly, there are investigative, and perhaps prosecutorial, deficiencies. Indeed, there are questions for the constabulary to address.