Excessive Enforcement: A Call for a Tranformational Approach to the Caribbean Criminal Justice System :: Argumentative Persuasive Carribean Essays

A Call for a Tranformational Approach to the Caribbean Criminal Justice System On June 25, 2001 Anton Cooper, a twenty-seven year old man in police custody at Golden Grove Prison in Arocca, Trinidad, was found naked and dead in his cell less than twenty four hours after his arrival for allegedly beating a cousin during an argument. Several prisoners reported witnessing numerous assaults on Cooper by prison guards, and Amnesty International called for a thorough, independent investigation that complies with international standards, including access by relatives to autopsy proceedings that concluded that Cooper died from asphyxia associated with multiple blunt traumatic injuries. Amnesty International has repeatedly expressed condemnation of the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers, and have stated that prison conditions in Trinidad continued to violate the UN standards for minimum treatment of prisoners, as well as amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. This particular incident raises to the international community not only questions of the level of corruption in Trinidad’s penal system, but how this reflects the enforcement of human rights protection in the English speaking Caribbean. In order to understand the role the justice system plays in advancing (or inhibiting) the Caribbean socially, economically, and politically, it is necessary to reflect on the historical uses and abuses of the penal system and how it functions alongside international criminal law. When analyzing the level of development nations of the English speaking Caribbean, specifically Trinidad & Tobago and Jamaica, have made in regards to human rights and law enforcement, certain factors need to be considered including their history of human rights protection; the role incarceration, flogging, and the death penalty play in limiting them as people of the past; the lack of community involvement in judicial affairs; their relations with international non-governmental organizations; and the feasibility of possible alternatives to impr isonment and the death penalty. Although this past March the East Caribbean Court of Appeal, referred to by the Judiciary Committee of the Privy Council, ruled that mandatory death penalty is in violation of the constitutions of St. Vincent and Grenadines, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Kitts, Dominica, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda by stating that, â€Å"to deny the offender the opportunity, before sentence is passed, to seek to persuade the court that in all the circumstances to condemn him to death would be disproportionate and inappropriate