Vaneisa: Should we hang? Does death penalty really act as a deterrent?
A young woman wrote this to me after my last column: ‘I’ve been thinking about this death penalty debate. I don’t know where I stand…’
It recalled for me a time when I too, did not know where to stand and how that changed.
I easily remember traumatic episodes from my childhood that shaped my utter aversion to violence of every kind. I was not yet 10 during this period.
Photo: Gale Ann Benson, the 27 year old daughter of a Tory MP, was murdered in Trinidad.
Trinidadian civil rights activist, Michael Abdul Malik, was believed to be responsible although he was eventually hanged for another murder.
Boodram Basdeo.
Between 2010 and 2019, 8,383 people went missing. Out of that number, 408 people were still not found at the end of 2019, statistics from the T&T Police Service show. For the last year, scores of other people were reported missing, among them several young women, a few of whom have since been located and returned home. Others remain unaccounted for.
Sunday Guardian received a list with the names of 112 people who were missing from Missing Persons T&T group on Facebook up to September 2020. However, they indicated that “The actual number of unaccounted people according to our count is ten times this number because these are the posts we made in the last year only.”
Mark Bassant and Rishard Khan
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley yesterday pleaded with citizens to come forward with information on the kidnapping of Andrea Bharatt, 23, as he addressed a news conference in Port-of-Spain.
“When these things happen there are people among us in the population who know what happened. And all I could say is that to whoever is listening – if you know something about this young lady and what is happening to her, just remember that the upholder is worse than the thief,” he said.
Bharatt, a clerk attached to the Arima Magistrate’s Court was kidnapped after entering a what appeared to be a taxi – a white Nissan Versa. Since then four suspects were detained for questioning in her disappearance.