EDITORIAL - Reopen debate on sentencing appeals

Justice David Fraser could hardly have been taken aback at the public outrage at the seemingly extreme leniency in his sentencing, more than a week ago, of a man who pleaded guilty to abducting, raping and strangling a 12-year-old girl, whom he left for dead. While he might not relish the spotlight for the reason he has commanded attention, we suspect that Justice Fraser welcomes the debate, apprehending that justice and the judiciary, even as they guard their independence, cannot, in a functioning democracy, be cloistered from the rest of the society.

Indeed, the matter may have provided an opportunity to return to the discourse on ideas for judicial reforms that have been starved of focus as people attend to the daily nuts-and-bolts problems of the system such as substandard facilities and a huge backlog of cases.

The broad facts of this controversy are that sometime in the early part of last year, Garsha Wilson, 27, lured the 12-year-old into his taxi with the ruse that he was taking her to meet a family member for a surprise.

Instead, Wilson, a family friend, took the child to a secluded place, raped her, then strangled her until he presumed her to be dead. He then buried her in a shallow grave and had the gall to join the family in a search for the child. She, in the meantime, regained consciousness, somehow clawed her way from her tomb and was able to raise an alarm. It was then that Wilson fled.

Wilson accepted his guilt and was sentenced to 12 years for attempted murder, 10 years for rape and eight years for abduction. The sentences are to run concurrently, which means that Wilson's maximum jail time is 12 years, although he, conceivably, could be paroled and/or get time off for good behaviour.

There are the wags who claim that Justice Fraser, who has been on the Bench for less than a year, really meant to sentence Wilson to 30 years, but misspoke, saying that the sentences were to run concurrently, but meant consecutively.

Anger and jokes aside, the matter raises some fundamental issues about judicial sentencing and whether victims, as represented by the State, ought to have the right of appeal against a judge's sentence when they believe justice has not been served.

Voice of the victim

First, this newspaper need not repeat its confidence in the competence and integrity of the Jamaican judiciary, the maintenance of whose independence we champion even as we acknowledge that judges sometimes get it wrong. It is in acknowledgement of this human capacity to err that there is a system of appeal in the justice system that, in the criminal division, is afforded to convicted persons.

The issue is whether this goes far enough.

If justice is also restorative, it is beyond question that victims, and the society more broadly, have a stake in the court's approaches to sentencing. Without impairing the independence of the judiciary, advocates of restorative justice might legitimately ask that judges take such views into consideration in their determination on categories of crimes. In that context, a public discussion on sentencing guidelines may be appropriate.

In the past, lawyers of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, where Justice Fraser once worked, have raised the matter of the appeal of sentences. That, too, may be worthy of rigorous debate and resolution.