'Legal quandry' after records destroyed in Guyana prison fire

Prisoners could be released

Wednesday, 12th July 2017

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.