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Courts no place for scapegoats
MR Justice Bernard Sakora is no
newcomer to legal circles in Papua New Guinea.
Nor is he a newcomer to the bench.
The judge’s record speaks for itself; he has been one of the more
determined upholders of the law during his career and one who
continues to reject
excuses for poor performance.
Individual crimes in PNG are less usual than those involving a
number of perpetrators.
Even rape is less often a case of an individual assault; many of
today’s cases involve large numbers of men.
Murders also reflect this trend.
Tribal murders often involve three or four attackers and even
where only one person wields the bush knife, several others may
have been actively involved in the planning and execution of the
killing.
They are as potentially culpable as the individual responsible for
the death blow.
This week, Judge Sakora highlighted a disturbing trend.
Police are becoming more inclined to regard one arrest as all that
is required by the law and by the courts to bring about a
conviction.
This, as the judge has pointed out, flies directly in the face of
the basic legal principles under which the police are required to
arrest and generate charges against all those suspected of direct
involvement in a case.
Many of us tend to see justice with one eye.
Most of the time the concept doesn’t impact upon us at all.
Its only when a relative or a person whom we know falls foul of
the law that our sense of what is and is not just is suddenly
reawakened.
If a court has no option but to find a sole suspect guilty of a
major crime, then it will do so.
But as Judge Sakora has pointed out, that comes about because too
often the police allow themselves to be satisfied with just one
arrest and just one person to face the judge.
The judge added that as a result, the convicted sole suspect
becomes like “a sacrificial lamb while the others get away”.
That’s where our one-eyed view of justice sometimes comes into
play.
The public allows itself to be satisfied with that one guilty
person and whatever happens to him or her becomes a kind of
symbolic sentence for the rest of the guilty group.
However, that’s not good enough.
It’s not good enough because such a finding carries within it the
risk of injustice towards the guilty party.
And whether we like it or not, that guilty person has rights under
the law, one of which is to be handed down a punishment in keeping
with the crime committed.
No worthwhile judge will concentrate the accumulated and projected
sentences of half a dozen missing suspects upon the head of the
one convict in court.
But the potential for that to happen remains.
On top of that, the risk to the community implicit in the case is
in no way assuaged.
One convict has been tried, found guilty and sentenced, but others
who may well have been every bit as much involved in a serious
crime are at large.
Such criminals on the run in PNG have proven to be a very real
threat to the community.
Many of them develop an ego based on an assumption of
invincibility.
They decide that the law cannot touch them; they are above and
beyond its reach.
And since they believe that to be the case, there’s nothing to
stop them continuing a career of violence, theft or rape.
In the brief time since the story appeared yesterday, we have
heard from a police officer who placed the blame on the Force’s
supposed lack of funds, equipment, vehicles, trained personnel,
prosecutors, senior detectives and inspectors.
That particular string of woes has been trotted out to the
community for decades; it doesn’t seem to matter how funds are
increased or what training is instituted, the cries remain.
The line must be drawn somewhere.
We now have a police hierarchy that is committed to change within
the Force, change that will restore the once outstanding
reputation of the RPNG Constabulary.
Hopefully, Mr Justice Sakora’s reservations will be one aspect of
those changes to be expeditiously addressed.
 
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