The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) and human rights groups, including Jamaicans for Justice, are urging the Government to reconsider its proposal for heavy mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for children convicted of murder. The JTA president, Leighton Johnson, expressed concerns about the potential infringement on children's rights and international obligations. While acknowledging Jamaica's crime problem, critics argue that imposing harsher penalties may not effectively deter crime and could lead to challenges in the courts.

Not 50 years for minors 

Jamaica Gleaner/2 May 2024

THE GOVERNMENT’S plan to sharply increase jail sentences for people convicted of homicide, we continue to feel, will at best prove symbolic. It may make the Holness administration appear tough on crime, but with little or no real deterrent effect.

The measures, though, with respect to their application to children, could push beyond rescuing young lives that have fallen astray, and might infringe Jamaica’s international obligations and the rights promised to children by the island’s Constitution.

For that reason, The Gleaner joins the humanrights group, Jamaicans for Justice – and others – in calling on the Government to abandon its proposal for heavy mandatory minimum sentences for children who commit murder, and for the existing system of the courts having substantial discretion over those penalties.

In other words, when Parliament resumes debate on the subject, the justice minister, Delroy Chuck, should announce that the administration will not go forward with the amendments to the Child Care and Protection Act. That, of course, can only happen at the direction of Prime Minister Andrew Holness.

Mr Holness might also want to have another turn at the plan for sentencing adults, while, in the meantime, concentrating on his other initiatives to tackle crime, some of which he spoke about in Parliament last week.

TOUGH-ON-CRIME SENTENCING REGIME

Unquestionably, Jamaica has a major problem of crime and criminal violence. Although the island’s murders fell by seven per cent in 2023, there were still nearly 1,400 recorded killings, or a homicide rate of around 51 per 100,000.

While Prime Minister Holness highlighted a raft of interventions being pursued by his government – ranging from reforming and modernising the police force to more and better-targeted social programmes – these statistics formed a crucial part of the backdrop against which Mr Chuck unveiled the tough-on-crime sentencing regime in February 2023.

Under that system, someone convicted of capital murder (such as killing a member of the security force or a witness to crime) could be sentenced to death (no executions have taken place in Jamaica in 36 years) or life imprisonment. The latter translates to a minimum 20 years in jail – or the minimum time that a convict has to serve before being eligible for parole. The Government’s intention is to jack that minimum period up to 50 years.

For non-capital murder for which a court imposes a life sentence, the prisoner has to serve 15 years before parole eligibility. The minimum jail time for such persons would go to 40 years.

For alternative fixed-term sentences for non-capital murder, minimum sentence would be 45 years with parole eligibility kicking in after 35 years.

Legal officials, including the island’s chief justice, Bryan Sykes, have warned that tougher sentences, including the basis for calculating sentencing discounts to people who plead guilty to their crimes, would act as a disincentive for accused persons going this route. With little to lose, they would likely take their chances at trial, which could lead to a renewed backlog in courts.

But for a few rights and children’s advocacy groups, the applicability of the new scheme to children convicted of murder has not, until now, attracted the same attention.

Currently, the Child Care and Protection Act allows a minor – someone under the age of 18 – to be sentenced to life. Further, the judge, “may specify a period that child should serve before becoming eligible for parole”.

However, under the Government’s proposal, a life sentence for a juvenile convicted for murder would start at 50 years, with 20 years having to be served before any entitlement to parole. For a homicide other than murder, the starting point would be 40 years, but the judge has leeway in determining when parole is possible.

“Government has to take a comprehensive approach to treating with the issue of violence, and especially youth violence, ”Mr Holness told Parliament last week.

We agree! But not by restricting a court, which has had a wide perspective of a matter before it, from tailoring its ruling to fit specific circumstances of the case.

MEASURE OF LAST RESORT

According to a parliamentary group that reviewed the Government’s bill, 3.02 per cent of the people accused of murder in Jamaica between 2017 and 2022 were minors. Some of that lot may indeed have been hardcore deviants who required the fullest sanction of the law. The majority, most likely, were children under the wrong influence who were sucked into a cruel vortex. Each represents an individual story that should be judged as such.

Which, in our view, gives expression to Section 13 (3) (k) of the provisions to Jamaican children “to such measures of protection as are required by virtue of the status of being a minor or as part of the family, society and the State”.

Further, while the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Jamaica is a signatory, concedes to the lawful imprisonment of children, it stresses that such lawful detentions “shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”.

Jamaica should have a hard look at whether its proposed law accords with this ideal.

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