Merely two years after passing a new gun law with a mandatory minimum of 15 years for possession, the Government on Thursday headlined its list of legislative priorities for 2025/2026 with planned amendments to that statute.

Acting Governor General Steadman Fuller, delivering the 2025 Throne Speech during the ceremonial opening of Parliament at Gordon House in downtown Kingston, said the planned update to the Firearms Act, to include a framework for plea negotiations, among other things, was “consequent to the effectiveness of the new mandatory minimum penalty, which has increased the level of interest among accused persons in entering guilty pleas”.

The new gun law, formally called the Firearms (Prohibition, Restriction and Regulation) Act, which took effect in November 2022, provides, among other things, penalties ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment for possession of illegal weapons; establishes a dual regime, distinguishing between prohibited weapons or unregulated firearms and firearms that are duly authorised or registered. It also speaks to establishing a framework which regards possession of prohibited firearms and ammunition as the foundation on which other violent crimes are committed.

Since being enacted, however, the legislation has proven problematic for practitioners both on and off the benches.

In December 2023, defence attorney Peter Champagnie, King’s Counsel, came out swinging, charging that Parliament was to blame for the dilemma playing out in the courts — with defendants charged under the Act opting to go to trial in an already clogged system. Champagnie said Parliament had turned a deaf ear to warnings from legal practitioners that this would happen.

“’Tis the season once again for our justice system to be in the spotlight; this has been fuelled by recent reports of accused persons before the Gun Court being far less inclined to plead guilty under the new firearms legislation, with the resultant risk of there being an erosion of the gains made in the reduction of the backlog cases in this court,” Champagnie said in a letter to the editor at the time.

The attorney said this, coupled with “the inordinate delay in obtaining DNA reports in criminal cases and the unwillingness of some members of our society to serve as jurors when called upon, have also emerged as factors likely to impede any timely delivery of justice”.

“Candidly, the issues that now plague our justice system are the result of our legislators refusing to heed the warnings of legal practitioners who foretold that the new firearms law would hardly see any accused charged under that law pleading guilty,” Champagnie lamented.

“This new law doesn’t provide any incentive in the way of a reduction in sentence for those wishing to plead guilty. Presently, whether one pleads guilty or not, an accused is assured of a minimum period of 15 years of imprisonment upon conviction for having a prohibited firearm. An accused would therefore sooner take his chances at a trial rather than offer up a plea of guilty,” the attorney said.

“It was naive of our legislators to think that the necessity to be remorseful and altruistic would be devoid of any consideration of a definite 15-year prison [term] when time came for any accused to contemplate pleading guilty. The result, therefore, is as it is now: The vast majority of cases are now moving towards trials. This is within the context of the reality that we simply do not have sufficient courtrooms, prosecutors, and judges to try all such cases within a reasonable time,” he added.

In September last year, Appeal Court President Marva McDonald Bishop — who said the Act was “giving problems” to prosecutors, trial judges, and appeal court judges alike — declared that there would be a full court sitting to hammer out issues with aspects of the new Act.

McDonald Bishop, who was presiding over a special sitting of the Appeal Court marking the opening of the Michaelmas Term — her first since being appointed — said the Act was one of those singled out, during a retreat for the profession, as problematic.

“There are issues pertaining to certain legislation and we can highlight the Firearms Act. The Firearms Act is giving problems to prosecutors, it’s giving problems to trial judges, and surely at the Court of Appeal. We might have seen other cases where the court might seem inconsistent in its approach and we have taken the decision that we have to take steps to put the court in a position where we can declare conclusively what the position of the court is on a particular area of the law so to avoid confusion,” Justice McDonald Bishop told the sitting.

“That is how we propose to deal with difficult areas; we empanel a court of no less than perhaps seven, given that it’s a court of 13 persons,” she said.

On Thursday, Opposition Leader Mark Golding, during a press briefing following the ceremonial opening of Parliament, said the Government was trying to save face after ignoring several warnings.

“When they passed that Firearms Legislation I was very clear that it was going to create a big problem in the court system and that is exactly what has happened, because when people are facing a 15-year minimum sentence for possession of a firearm, regardless of the circumstances, there is absolutely no incentive other than to go to trial and try and win the case,” Golding, an attorney by profession, said.

“We had introduced, in 2015, legislation that allowed people to seek a discount in sentence by pleading guilty as early as possible in court proceedings and that was a very successful measure in reducing the backlog of criminal cases in the Gun Court and Parish Court. This legislation has basically put a block on that. They realised that it’s untenable so that is why they are seeking to amend it,” he declared.

“I don’t know exactly what they are trying to do, but it is quite clear that what they have done is having a deleterious effect on the court system and it has to be fixed,” the opposition leader said.

His colleague parliamentarian Fitz Jackson added: “They were warned.”