'Legal quandry' after records destroyed in Guyana prison fire

Prisoners could be released

2025-08-01 17:35:42

With thousands of conviction records, prisoner profiles, sentence particulars, and committal warrants destroyed on Sunday in a massive fire at the Camp Street prison in Georgetown, Guyana, the state may face a legal quandary or a massive judicial and penal confusion as it relates to the inmates that are currently in custody.

While a duplicate record from a case file may offer some significant help, since prisoners are known to provide false names when arrested and convicted, compounded by the non-existence of a fingerprint or photographic profile of a tried person on a case jacket, it may become difficult for the state effectively and fairly to determine who was convicted and who was not.

Moreover, there are legal arguments that a committal warrant cannot be recreated or written up for a second time by a magistrate or judge who did not hand down a sentence.

Several legal precedents have been highlighted, involving cases where a person’s original conviction record was destroyed.

Outside of that, the laws of Guyana forbid the prison system from incarcerating a person without a warrant or an instrument that was issued by a convicting magistrate or judge, to commit that person to prison.