Mandeville, Manchester – A compulsory national registration system incorporating a swipe card with fingerprint data for every Jamaican and the resumption of the death penalty will be central to the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP’s) anti-crime plan should they form the next Government, Opposition Leader Bruce Golding said Thursday night.

Addressing thousands of supporters at Grey Ground, just outside Mandeville in Manchester, Golding said his party would utilise modern technology to the fullest extent to deal with crime, which is routinely identified by Jamaicans as the biggest problem afflicting their country.

“I want to get to a stage where the police, if they are looking for somebody and somebody come up that (could be the one), they must be able to determine in a split second who that person is,” said the opposition leader.

Golding, who occasionally in the past has been opposed to or at least ambivalent on the death penalty despite a strong pro-hanging stance by party spokesman on crime Derrick Smith, insisted that a government run by him would “reinstitute the death penalty and we make no apology about it”.

Though capital punishment remains the ultimate penalty for murder on the Jamaican law books, there have been no court-sanctioned hangings in Jamaica since the late 1980s.

On Thursday night, Golding blamed the People’s National Party (PNP) governments of the last 18 years for being tardy in the issuing of death warrants, which he suggested had invariably led to the commuting of death sentences after five years on death row for condemned men.

Under a ruling by the Privy Council – Jamaica’s highest court – in 1993, condemned men who have been on death row for five years automatically escape the hangman’s noose.

Golding said ridding the police force of corrupt individuals and social intervention to provide training and economic opportunities for young people in depressed communities would also be important planks in the drive against criminals.

Reigniting a decades-old debate about a compulsory national registration and fingerprinting system which, like the death penalty, has triggered unease and opposition among human rights advocates, Golding recalled that in the 1970s he was part of a parliamentary group that advocated such a system.

“I was a member of the committee that worked on it along with Keble Munn (PNP),” said Golding. “. a national registration system where we going to require everybody to have a national ID card. I am not talking ’bout voting card now, but a national ID card. From you reach 14 you have to have one. We are going to assign a unique number to everybody from the day they born. And when you reach 14 you are going to have to have that national ID card, you are going to be required to carry it with you, and if you don’t have it with you, we still going to be able to test you because we going tek yu fingerprint. And it is going to enable us to put on a kind of surveillance system where if you are a gunman and you driving along the road and the police stop you, they will require your ID card . and they go into the police car and swipe in the machine . once they swipe that ID card and once they tek your finger and push it on a thing, within a matter of a few seconds, it must say ‘yes, this is the man wanted for ’bout six murder’,” Golding told the large, enthusiastic crowd.

Elaborating on what he said was the Government’s role in the failure to implement the death penalty, Golding said: “The murderer goes to court, they find him guilty. They sentence him to death. But the Government has to advise the governor-general to issue the death warrant, for until you issue the warrant nothing can begin. They don’t issue the death warrant and sometimes when . they get to the stage when they issue the death warrant, by that time four years have elapsed and the man start to make his appeal. Before you know what happen, five years pass and the appeal still don’t come through and you can’t hang him again, because the Privy Council says everything must be done in five years.”

Golding said strong action was needed to combat violent crime, which accounted for 414 murders in the JLP’s last “full year” of political power in 1988 but had worsened to the point where there were close to “four times” that number annually.