THE ISSUE SURROUNDING the application for, and the granting of, bail to Constable Everton Gittens, who has been charged with the murder of Selwyn “Blues” Knight, was bound to be controversial, and the ill-advised and inappropriate comments of Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite did not help.
As the country’s de facto chief law officer and the Government’s principal legal advisor he should have been more judicious with his comments.
If he felt strongly about the matter he should have offered his support to Gittens’ colleagues in the Royal Barbados Police Force away from the glare of the cameras.
But when all is said and done, and the emotion is stripped away from the debate, it can’t be hard for any reasonable, right-thinking person to conclude that given all the circumstances the constable was a fit and proper candidate for bail.
The granting of bail does not make him or any other accused person potentially any less guilty, just as keeping him or any other accused person on remand wouldn’t make him any more guilty.
We need to accept that remand to prison cannot be imposed on any person charged with a crime as a form of punishment and therefore it is wrong to suggest that any individual, because of the supposed facts of the alleged crime, is guilty and call for punishment, even before a trial is conducted.
We understand the pain that any family that has lost a valued member in tragic circumstances would feel, and the country ought to collectively lend them a shoulder as they endeavour to get beyond the hurt – but premature punishment of any accused person is just plain wrong. If anything, we should direct our ire at those who administer the excruciatingly slow system.
The issue of whether or not Everton Gittens should have been granted bail would never have arisen if we had not reached the point where every murder accused is now almost automatically a candidate for bail because of the slow pace at which the criminal justice system operates. No murder accused should be waiting three, four or five years for a trial to start.
In any event, when a person is not granted bail it is generally because he or she is a flight risk, is a risk to himself or herself outside of the confines of prison, is likely to be at risk of reprisal from persons connected to the victim, or the person’s freedom could put the proper investigation of the alleged crime in doubt.
However, in the case of a constable like Gittens, it is very likely that consideration of his application would have included the high likelihood that his incarceration pending trial would have been much harder on him than other individuals.
Affording an incarcerated police officer the “freedom” of association with the general prison population would most likely have exposed him to significantly more danger than the average prisoner.
Under the circumstances if Gittens had been kept in custody it would not have been hard for a lawyer to argue that even under harsher conditions he was still being treated by the system with lesser consideration than ordinary civilians in the same circumstances. The granting of bail by the High Court last week was not an unreasonable act. The constable still has to answer the charges against him.
But perhaps some good will come of this whole mess. Maybe this scenario will galvanise in the minds of those responsible the need to reform urgently the justice system to speed up the conduct of trials.
Hopefully, we have not so entrenched the concept of bail for murder accused that henceforth it is taken for granted that bail for the ultimate charge is as routine as that for shoplifting or possession of a marijuana spliff.
