Let that sink in. A man died. As in, he'll never go back home to see his family, work on a construction site or have rice and peas and curry chicken again.
That, my friends, is a human rights issue.
It honestly doesn't matter to me how he got into the lockup and why. It however matters a lot to the reformers who are trying to benefit from his death and make it an issue of marijuana law reform and to angle for changes in Jamaica's legislation so that possessing small quantities of weed is no longer an offence.
That's great. Except a man is dead. And the weed did not kill him.
Mario Deane was held in the custody of the persons who say that “[w]e serve, we protect, we reassure with courtesy, integrity and proper respect for the rights of all”. That's from the Jamaica Constabulary Force's website. Clearly then, it must be true. Except in this case, a man was EITHER severely beaten by the police OR fell off a bed in custody OR was severely beaten by inmates...in a police station...where the police could have stopped them. All those stories have made the rounds over the past few days.
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| Mario Deane after his time in the Barnett Street Police Station. |
And let me be controversial: I don't give a flying johncrow why he was brought into custody. Some of the advocates that have come out against his death have maintained that he hadn't killed or raped anyone so he didn't deserve to die. That's the kind of 'eye for an eye' mentality that we are trying to avoid so I don't think it is useful . How about we support that nobody should die in police custody. How about we support the idea that proper respect for the rights of all includes the right to life? That not so new Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms in s. 13(3)(a) says that Jamaicans have "the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in the execution of the sentence of a court in respect of a criminal offence of which the person has been convicted". Yeah, it pretty much means that Mario's death, like the deaths of Michael Gayle and Agana Barrett (even though under the old constitutional provision) was unconstitutional.
I am friends with too many people, too many men in this country, to sit idly by while a young man dies in lockup. Who did it? There may have been specific hands and feet that led to that young man's death. However, lockups aren't vast fortresses where the guards are 10 miles away from the prisoners. The police must take some responsibility, even if they didn't strike the killing blow, for the death of a young man on their watch. Andrew Holness would like us to have our own Human Rights Commission. I think we just need to use every single body we already have. Like INDECOM. After all, many of the most noticeable breaches come from agents of the State.
Funny Man Robin Williams died yesterday. He was found in his house following an apparent suicide. He was amazing actor and a good bit of my childhood movie enjoyment came from him. R.I.P. good sir.
But I've seen more condolences going out to a man Jamaicans have never met than to Mario, a man who could have been any one of us. That, my friends, is Jamaica's focus.
