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Stabroek News

LETTER OF THE DAY - Police excesses and the Charter of Rights
published: Saturday | October 6, 2007

The Editor, Sir:

Over the past weeks, we have had a spate of dubious police killings. This comes against the background of years of accusations of police brutality and police excesses, mostly by poor inner-city residents.

Many inner-city residents contend that the lives of hundreds of young men and a few women and children have been ended in cold-blood by wanton police officers over the last 20 years. Many of these residents reckon that this has continued over the years because no dignity and worth is bestowed on the poor persons living in inner-city communities.

A large number of Jamaicans believe that the crime problem confronting us requires such police excesses and that some men should be killed without due process of law. What many fail to realise however, is that if there is widespread acceptance of this modus operandi, then, we might as well abandon the criminal justice system. You see, this action clearly assumes that one is guilty until proven innocent, totally contrary to our notion of justice.

Those who attempt to excuse brutality and excesses on the basis that it is for some other good, even the public good, must understand that it is not the state of being that has intrinsic worth, it is the person. Moral worth and human dignity are inseparable from the person.

Can an infant's life be forfeited because he/she has Down syndrome? Can we take all the physically challenged and emotionally and psychologically damaged and sweep them as litter under the rug? We must understand that if human beings don't have intrinsic dignity and worth then it would seem legitimate to use them for any utility whatsoever as long as the utility has some intrinsic value or worth to us. Ideas do have consequences.

Created equal

Human beings do not have value in as much as it leads to a certain quality of life; the human being is value in itself. To destroy intrinsic dignity and worth is to undermine a major foundation of democracies and our fundamental rights - that all men are created equal. Men are not created equal except in one way, they are all men.

They all have inherent dignity and moral worth independent of any other quality they can experience or value they bring to society. Upon this truth our fundamental rights, human respect, personal responsibility, moral obligations and our system of justice should stand. We await the Charter of Rights.

I am, etc.,

COUNCILLOR DELROY WILLIAMS

delroyhwilliams@yahoo.com

Cockburn Pen

Kingston 11

Via Go-Jamaica

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