St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, speaking at the regional crime symposium in Trinidad on Monday, again called for the death penalty for some crimes.
Gonsalves said that as a Roman Catholic, the Catholic Church preaches that the death penalty should not be, and because his mother was a Catholic Legionary of Mary, she taught him also that there should be no death penalty.
Gonsalves said he happens to think that both his mother and the pope are wrong.
“For murder other than a crime of passion, you should get the death penalty, and the Europeans don’t like that they had it for a long time, and they may not want to give aid if you bring it back, and so on and so forth”.
Gonsalves said he is satisfied, having been a legal practitioner for many years, that most of the people who do kill are cowards.
“Never mind this macho thing that they see they may present. They are absolute cowards, and if we have that as a particular option in the punishment schedule and for the courts not to make it very well nigh impossible to carry out the death penalty, what I’m talking about here is that people in the taverns across Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and so on are talking about these things, you know”.
Gonsalves said that too many of our judges and magistrates are too soft.
“Sometimes you get the impression that some magistrates, depending on who is the lawyer, give their clients better treatment.” “Everybody talks about this, you know, but they talk about it behind closed doors; you don’t hear it from a prime minister.”
“There is, in aspects of our judiciary, a creeping lack of awareness as to some of the problems that we face. How can you go and give up someone who is charged with murder? Bail. Let’s be serious. How can you do that? I saw the numbers from the Bahamas, where those judges live on Mars”.
Gonsalves said all of these matters touch on and concern how the region is going to address the question of crime.
He said the region has put a lot of resources—this Caribbean—into the police, into fighting crime, in the judiciary, and in the prosecution service, and more money ought to be put in. We have to do several things regionally.
