“We chop him, till you can’t tell eye from nose or mouth. Even him tongue chop out. Everytime him get chop, him hiccup till we chop off him head clean,” went the chilling account of a member of a vigilante group after wreaking savage justice on a man accused of murdering his three nieces.

In the past two years, police have reported at least 41 mob killings that indicate that Jamaicans are increasingly taking the law into their own hands and exacting a form of jungle justice against people they believe have wronged them.

Experts suggest that vigilante killings are fed by the widely held perception that the country’s justice system moves too slowly or that criminals are likely to get off their charges far too easily. It is also believed that the often gory acts satisfy the blood lust of angry citizens who feel helpless in the face of maurauding criminals who murder, rob and rape with impunity.

Last year, a record one for crime, the murder toll jumped to over 1,400 and killings have continued unabated this year.

“You have to realise that communities feel justified in commiting these acts, it is commonplace in certain inner-city communities where you have cases where people bag them and tag them, them being people who have committed crimes such as rape, robbery or murder and the community feels justified in killing them,” said Churchill Neita, a leading criminal lawyer.

“It also occurs in rural communities against people such as goat thieves,” said Neita, who has been involved in some cases having to do with vigilante justice. He noted that sometimes vigilante justice did not involve killing but a beating might be administered to the assumed perpetrator.

Some of the cases also arise from outrage over particularly heinous crimes such as that of Melton Haase, who ran amok with a machette, hacking to death three small children who were his nieces in the rural St Andrew village of Recourse, in March last year.

Haase who was said to be mentally unstable, also injured three other persons, including his sister. Cornered by the mob, Haase was tricked into dropping his weapon, and set upon by the residents.

“We tell “Wiseman” (Haase) we a go carry him go to the doctor and him come and drop the cutlass,” said one man. When Haase finally came out of hiding, he was given no chance. “We chop him, till you can’t tell eye from nose or mouth,” claimed one man. “Even him tongue chop out. Every time him get chop, him hiccup till we chop off him head clean.”

The graphic description was given by a man who apparently believed that he and his co-mob members had committed no crime and underlined the pervasive attitude that persons who commit certain crimes should be killed on the spot.

That mindset, experts agreed, was not limited to social class or intellectual standing, as in the case of one hapless man accused of breaking into cars on the University of Technology campus, in March 2003.

The man, along with two apparent accomplices who managed to escape, was chased into a waste water pit after being cornered by people whom the police assume to be students who proceeded to set fire to dry grass surrounding the pit to prevent his escape.

No one came forward to give a statement on the issue and a police spokesman said that in the face of the silence, they were not certain whether they were investigating an accidental drowning or a case of murder.

“The report I got is that students set fire to the dried grass that surrounded the edge of the pit to prevent the men from escaping and there were also reports that stones and bottles were thrown at them,” a police spokesman said.

The men were chased after it was discovered that at least five cars were broken into during a function on the UTech campus that night.

Frequently, the mob gets it wrong and innocent people are believed to be killed. Police reported the case several years ago where a man, said to be visiting a deep rural district in search of his estranged daughter, was set upon by a mob and hacked to death before he could explain his case.

The residents were apparently on the lookout for goat thieves who had plagued the area and the man was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Typically, prosecutions for vigilante killings are rare as citizens maintain a stony wall of silence when asked to come forward and give evidence.

Neita said the process involved in bringing a case to prosecuton was a difficult one because the alleged perpetrators had to be apprehended, and identified by witnesses as having committed the deed.

He cited one case in which he appeared in Blueware in Westmoreland in the 1980s, where citizens allegedly murdered two policemen and filled their wounds with ganja.

The suggestion was that the policemen had preyed on the ganja farmers in the community, taking away their product and arresting a number of persons.

However, nobody from the community was willing to come forward and actually give evidence against the alleged perpetrators identified as having committed the crime, Neita said.

The same motive – swift justice – that drives citizens to become vigilante killers, is often responsble for claims of extra-judicial killings by officers of the state, namely the police and army – an issue frequently on the agenda of human rights groups.

Jamaica has featured prominently in reports by international human rights watch groups such as Amnesty International and most recently the US State department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, as well as local groups such as Jamaicans For Justice, as commiting serious human rights breaches through its security forces, specifically for unlawful and unwarranted killings.

The country made a list of 196 countries compiled by the State Department citing Jamaica as guilty of unlawful police killings and vigilante killings, among others.

“Policemen are human beings, too, and they get frustrated when they work hard to bring in someone they know is a killer, only to see that person back on the street the next day,” said a social worker who did not want to be identified.

But Monsignor Richard Albert, known as the “ghetto priest” because of his extensive work in the violence-prone inner-cities, said vigilante justice was a destabilising force in the society that should be rooted out.

“When we take on a mob mentality no one is safe. We need to take every precaution to see that the state provides officers of the law that uphold the law and protects its citizens,” said Albert.

Father Albert also suggested that the fundamental canon that should guide behaviour in this regard was the Biblical injunction ‘Thou shall not kill’, noting that it provided the ultimate guide to human behaviour.