Former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday’s conviction and sentence have been squashed. The Court of Appeal this afternoon ordered a new trial at the Magistrate’s Court before a different Magistrate. Mr. Panday was sentenced to two years in jail and fined by Chief Magistrate Sherman McNicolls after being found guilty of not declaring a Million Dollar London bank account to the Integrity Commission.
Continue reading Basdeo Panday’s conviction has been squashed
Category Archives: Crime in T&T
Crime will not stop the Carnival
By Raffique Shah
February 18, 2007
It’s the columnist’s perennial dilemma: what topic to address on a Carnival Sunday? Who reads newspapers around this time anyway? Pan “peongs” in their thousands will be bleary-eyed and either celebrating the sound of steel or fuming over the judges’ decisions from last night’s Panorama finals. Many more who will have attended Friday night’s cacophony, “Soca Monarch”, rendered tone-deaf by noise boxes supreme, are too dazed to do anything but seek out more noise. And the few who have remained sober until now will be psychologically adjusting their systems for the stupor that will start by nightfall.
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The Valley of Hopelessness
By Stephen Kangal
February 19, 2007
The national community must show its outrage on the post -Cabinet uttering made by Minister Valley on the crime situation and widely reported in the media on Thursday 24 January. After the Manning Administration has led many citizens without any protection into the valley of the shadow of untimely and premature death and rampant crime that also potentially threatens each one of us, Minister Valley repeats the insensitivity of his Prime Minister and proceeds to justify our spiraling crime pandemic as being part of a “global event”. It has nothing to do, according to him, with the total failure of his Government to guarantee our life, liberty, the security of the person and our hard-earned property. For him crime, like inflation, is a feature of the global village of which T&T is a part. It is externally determined.
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Doing the ‘danse macabre’
By Raffique Shah
February 04, 2007
Last Thursday night, in districts as diverse as Carenage and Laventille, Morne Diablo and Enterprise, the criminal communities (oh, yes: those fellas have “communities”!) fired assorted gunshots saluting Police Commissioner Trevor Paul. Paul, along with Brigadiers Peter Joseph and Edmund Dillon, had earlier appeared on television promising to “run the criminals to the ground” over the carnival season. For the millionth time a CoP threatened “zero tolerance”, vowing to lock up jaywalkers and gay-walkers and maybe a few pickpockets and drunkards and pamphleteers. Little wonder the real criminals, the gunmen who are our new rulers, who call the shots very literally, were celebrating.
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Grandparents bludgeoned to death
By Nalinee Seelal, newsday.co.tt
January 31 2007
An elderly couple was beaten to death at their Cascade home yesterday by bandits who escaped with an iron safe, leaving behind two infant children crawling in the blood of their murdered grandparents.
The badly beaten body of retired Neal and Massy auto manager, Clyde Commissiong, 69, and his 70-year-old wife, Denise, were found covered in blood in two separate areas of their home on Riverside Road, Cascade. The discovery was made by their daughter Simone, around midday yesterday.
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We are failing the promises of Independence
By Errol F. Hosein
January 27, 2007
The recent slaughter of four individuals in Morvant including a police officer and the horrific exposure to the atrocity by a young child, is a startling reminder that few are safe from harms way in our present-day society.
We are rapidly becoming a dysfunctional society in which crime and criminals command respect. Too frequently we make comparative analysis about crime and criminal activity in other countries around the world as if to minimize the pain and suffering that we are presently experiencing. This is simply morbid.
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Sledgehammer for a sandfly
By Raffique Shah
January 28, 2007
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!
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Woman Police Constable among 4 shot dead in Morvant
4 shot dead in Morvant
By Nalinee Seelal, newsday.co.tt
January 23 2007
A 47-year-old Woman Police Constable attached to the Morvant Police Station, her 48-year-old husband, 20-year-old daughter and a man said to be in his ’40s were gunned down by four masked gunmen, who stormed into the Pelican Extension, Morvant home of the officer around 8.30 pm last night.
The gunmen shot dead WPC Elizabeth Sutherland, her husband Ivan, their daughter Anika, and Kevan Serrette. Newsday also learned that a grandchild was present at the time of the shooting, but up to 10.30 pm last night could not be accounted for. Police helicopters were hovering over the scene and police officers were combing the area looking for the child.
Continue reading Woman Police Constable among 4 shot dead in Morvant
Do not follow the U.S. prison system
By Linda E. Edwards
January 20, 2007
Re: Marion O’Callahan’s Commentary in Newsday
There are two additional ways we do not want, definitely do not want, to follow the U.S. prison system.
1. The building of private prisons to be leased to the state is one of them. In this system – example Corrections Corporation of America – (check the U.S. stock exchange for trading values), shareholders get together and build a prison. Now for the shareholders to make a profit, just like a hotel, the institution has to operate at maximum efficiency. That is full or almost full. So shareholders have a vested interest in keeping these prisons full.
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UNC: Bring back hangings
Trinidad Express
January 10th 2007
Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar says killers should be hanged.
“I believe that we need to seriously examine the actual implementation of the death penalty.
“Yes, I am speaking about bringing back hanging. We live in drastic times now and drastic measures are necessary,” she said at the United National Congress’s Monday night People’s Forum at Gasparillo.
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