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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

AG wants approval of anti-crime weapons

by

20140614

T&T has more "cold" crime cas­es than "hot" ones and there's been a marked in­crease in drug mules pass­ing through T&T, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan said yes­ter­day.Ram­lo­gan gave the above in­for­ma­tion when ex­plain­ing his rea­sons for de­fend­ing an­ti-crime leg­is­la­tion in Par­lia­ment that would al­low po­lice to ob­tain DNA sam­ples from sus­pect­ed crim­i­nals.

Not­ing the Akiel Cham­bers mur­der case, he said the law would give au­thor­i­ties a da­ta bank of sam­ples with which to com­pare and make match­es when DNA ev­i­dence is ob­tained.Un­less there was some­thing to com­pare a sam­ple with, he said, all the ev­i­dence the po­lice col­lect­ed would sim­ply be a "po­lice mu­se­um."Ram­lo­gan was re­spond­ing to com­plaints from Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) MP Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald about as­pects of the leg­is­la­tion.

She said vis­i­tors to T&T would have to be fin­ger­print­ed and this would neg­a­tive­ly af­fect T&T's re­la­tions, es­pe­cial­ly with Cari­com which has sig­nif­i­cant trade with T&T. She said it would al­so af­fect T&T's tourism and in­vest­ment if peo­ple didn't want to be fin­ger­print­ed."You have to af­ford Cari­com na­tion­als equal treat­ment as T&T na­tion­als," Mc­Don­ald said.

She al­so protest­ed sec­tions of the leg­is­la­tion which would al­low au­thor­i­ties to take a sus­pect's blood sam­ple for DNA pur­pos­es and store it for 20 years. She felt that vi­o­lat­ed sus­pects' rights.In re­sponse, Ram­lo­gan said, "If you think you'll scare away in­vestors by ask­ing them to be fin­ger­print­ed, the ma­jor­i­ty of states, from the US and UK to Eu­ro­pean na­tions, al­so re­quire this in their laws. Un­cle Sam (the US) par­tic­u­lar­ly re­quires fin­ger­print­ing, and in­vestors don't flee the US–so be re­al­is­tic."

He said the law wouldn't de­ny en­try to any­one, but sought to reg­u­late im­mi­gra­tion pro­ce­dures that al­lowed peo­ple in­to T&T.Say­ing all states had laws to pro­tect their cit­i­zens, Ram­lo­gan said when he vis­it­ed the Ba­hamas re­cent­ly he wasn't al­lowed to en­ter, since he had not had a yel­low fever shot. He said he had to get one and then was al­lowed to en­ter.

Not­ing the in­ci­dent in which an Erin cou­ple's house was burned down by ban­dits af­ter they were robbed, Ram­lo­gan called on the Op­po­si­tion to put de­cent law-abid­ing cit­i­zens' rights ahead of sus­pects' rights when it came to tak­ing DNA sam­ples.Out of 14,033 pris­on­ers, he said, 581 have three con­vic­tions or more and T&T's re­cidi­vism rate was 40 per cent."We're sit­ting on a time bomb," Ram­lo­gan added.

"We make no apolo­gies, this is hard-hit­ting law. If this is a con­sti­tu­tion­al in­va­sion of their pri­va­cy, then so be it. T&T is be­ing held to ran­som by a small group of crim­i­nals and it's time to stop the tail from wag­ging the dog."He said the US and oth­er places stored DNA sam­ples for up to 75 years.


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