Government may have jumped the gun by amending the Bail Act, charges a leading criminal defence attorney.
Instead, argues Queen’s Counsel Andrew Pilgrim, it should first deal with the issue of delayed murder trials than simply “lock up people for two years before we do anything with them”.
“As we speed towards this thing about keeping people for two years, I want us to set that in the context that we have not done a murder trial, I think, for about nine months,” Pilgrim said, while speaking on Starcom Network’s Brass Tacks Sunday call-in programme.
“We have . . . an impediment to doing any murder trials right now. A part of the impediment is passing a bill in the House. So before we address passing that bill in the House that would allow us to do murder trials, we are saying we are going to lock up people for two years . . . before we consider granting them bail,” he said.
“Don’t you think that one of those things should happen first before the other?” he asked pointedly. (RA)
Subscribe now to our eNATION edition.
For the latest stories and breaking news updates download the Nationnews apps for iOS and Android.
