‘Unprecedented’ numbers before Mercy Committee

THE Mercy Committee, tasked with providing the President with recommendations to commute sentences and pardon people in prison, will have to deal with unprecedented numbers to deal with the prisoners applying to be released in the response to the covid19 pandemic.

Director of Public Prosecutions Roger Gaspard, SC, when contacted, said he could not give an exact figure as to how many people had applied to the committee, before the pandemic.

However, he said those numbers added to the more than 500 applications expected to be considered by the committee in an attempt to lessen the prison population.

This, Gaspard said, would see the committee dealing with more applications than it had ever had before.

“You would appreciate that the virus is a novel situation,” said Gaspard. “So the numbers the committee would have to deal with would be unprecedented.”

Gaspard said all members of the committee which include Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi and Minister of National Security Stuart Young would be needed to consider the applications. Gaspard said that has not been done yet.

Minister of National Security, Stuart Young, in an address last year at the Maximum Security Prison in Arouca, said the committee would begin meeting on a monthly basis, and that he had been perusing files of the applicants, which at that time amounted to hundreds.

On April 20, Al-Rawi announced that 957 prisoners were eligible to be released early from prison as part of the State’s anti-covid19 plans.

He said people in eight categories were being considered.

These included 84 who were convicted of summary offences; 62 people convicted summarily of indictable offences; one person convicted of an indictable offence; 137 people charged with summary offences but who did not have access to bail; 16 children who were charged and unable to access bail; 44 people held for being in default of maintenance fees; and 459 who were convicted of a summary offence and are in their final year of their sentence.