Bail legislation - McDowell glosses over system flaws

JUSTICE Minister Michael McDowell contends that our legislative provisions for the granting of bail are very stringent. Our system of justice assumes that people charged with crimes are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Denying bail to people before they have been convicted is, to a degree, a perversion of our system of justice.

The 16th Amendment of the Constitution, passed in November 1996, allows a court to refuse bail to a person charged with a serious offence where it is reasonably considered necessary to prevent the commission of a serious crime by that person.

The Criminal Justice Act, 1984, provides that anyone convicted of committing an offence while on bail should receive a consecutive sentence, if convicted of committing a crime while on bail. The legislation had contributed to an improvement in that people who commit crimes while on bail can be held accountable for those crimes, whereas previously they were just given two concurrent sentences, which essentially meant they practically got off free for one of the crimes.

The Bail Act, 1997, gave effect to the amendment by tightening up the system of bail.

“During the term of office of the Rainbow Coalition,” Mr McDowell told the Dáil last week, “the number of prisoners on temporary release reached an all-time high of 20% at one stage.”

The minister contends that “as a result of the action of this Government, this so-called revolving door system operated by the Rainbow Coalition has been stopped and the percentage of the prison population on temporary release now is approximately 2.3%”.

It reality, the current Government had nothing to do with the introduction of the various pieces of legislation that he cited.

The Criminal Justice Act, 1984, was introduced and enacted into law during a Fine Gael-Labour Coalition headed by Dr Garret FitzGerald, while the Constitutional Referendum of November 1996 and the Bail Act of 1997 were both introduced and implemented during the life of the Rainbow Government.

It was therefore patently disingenuous of the minister to claim credit for the impact of the legislation while criticising those who actually implemented it.

One might understand Mr McDowell complaining that the bail system still has glaring deficiencies, but he glossed over them.

For instance, 43 crimes under the heading of homicide were committed by people on bail during the two years 2004 and 2005. In addition, people on bail committed: 523 assaults, 64 sexual offences, 50 cases of arson, 750 drug offences, 5,794 thefts, 2,417 burglaries, and 643 robberies.

With the addition of frauds and other instances of headline crimes, the total number of serious crimes committed by people on bail came to 10,902 for the two years.

This is clearly not something the minister should be bragging about.

While our system requires that people must be assumed to be innocent until they are convicted in a court of law, many of the people who have been creating problems while out on bail have previously been convicted of crimes.

When it comes to eligibility for bail, those previously convicted should be in a different category, because this is still a serious problem that needs to be tackled.