High Court Justice urges youth to put down guns, take up opportunities for improvement

On a day that Barbados recorded its third firearm-related murder for 2022, gun offenders and would-be culprits are being urged to “raise up” their country and “stop shooting it down”.

Justice Carlisle Greaves made that appeal, delivered a stinging rebuke of persons who used their challenges as crutches, and offered advice on Thursday as he fined convicted gunman Carl Leslie Hinds Jr $15,000 for having a .22 revolver and four rounds of ammunition and told him to spread the message that the High Court has a zero tolerance approach when dealing with such cases.

His comments came on the same day 56-year-old Merton Patrick Hinds was fatally shot in New Orleans and 23-year-old Rakeesh Grant suffered gunshot injuries in a drive-by shooting between Waterhall Land and Hill Road.

“Take up a pencil and a pen . . . before taking up a gun. Get something in your brain rather than shooting out and spouting out nonsense. Raise up your family, raise up your race . . . raise up your country and stop shooting it down,” Justice Greaves said.

The veteran jurist told offenders to make positive changes in their lives, as he lamented that for far too long, they were finding excuses not to elevate themselves and were putting the blame for their inadequacies on others.

He said he did “not buy this thing” about people rebelling because of the absence of their fathers growing up.

“. . . . Because their father was somewhere else, particularly when he was off trying to earn a living. The promotion of this thing leads to a lot of weakness in our men,” Justice Greaves said.

Disclosing that when he was a child his father was in another country trying to earn a living, he added: “It never made me feel that I shouldn’t do what I have to do in life to be a success, to keep out of trouble. We look around for a lot of crutches to hold on to, in my view.”

Instead, the jurist said, he tried to prove his critics wrong and he advised young people to do the same.

“Whenever anybody challenges me on my adequacy, I try to prove them wrong and I usually succeed. That is the way that people of our kind ought to be. Just because you were born poor and somebody calls you that, you are going to stay poor all the time? Or just because you didn’t pass the Common Entrance to a so-called good school, you are going to go through life trying to prove to people that you are no good? Prove them wrong! Just because your father someplace else you are going to prove that you are a delinquent? Prove them wrong! When I hear those kinds of excuses it gets personal to me,” he said.

While he acknowledged that not everyone could do what he had done with his life, “too many failed to try”.

“Oh, I black so I can’t. Oh, I poor so I can’t. Oh, I went to school at so and so, so I can’t. What foolishness is that? The further down from which you have to climb, the sweeter the heights when you reach to pick the fruit. There are people who start from halfway up and three-quarters up and you look up at them like they made some great achievement when they reach the top. Oh no, oh no. The man that had to climb from ground zero when he reached the top, that’s a man to admire.

“ . . . You don’t fall off the edge and start associating with jokers and smoking dope and toying about with guns. You make something of yourself despite the challenges. The challenges are what make you strong. . . ,” added Greaves who explained that the same challenges that the offenders before the court bemoaned were the same that men from his generation encountered.

The judge strongly urged those who faced challenges to “get up and fight”.
fernellawedderburn@barbadostoday.bb