Dear Editor,

Thank you for publishing our letter [albeit much abridged] concerning the plight of Garvin Grumble, jailed for three years by a Berbice magistrate for possession of just ten grammes of cannabis.

Our surprise at the severity of this sentence was later matched by our surprise that no one else seems to have picked up this matter, or seems even to care.

Today (Saturday), however, our surprise knows no bounds. We now read in your pages that a woman caught smuggling five thousand grammes of the hard narcotic, cocaine, has received ... three years jail: the same that poor old Garvin got for his pinch of weed.

So where is the justice? Where are those salt-of-the-earth citizens who not so long ago would have been up in arms (figuratively speaking, we hasten to add) at such a sanctional disparity?

Had Garvin had been a wealthy trader, no doubt he would have had recourse to the best legal counsel, appeals and adjournments until the sentence was reduced or until the matter disappeared - like so many others - never to be heard of again. But being just a grass-root (and stem) man no doubt Grumble will just have to languish in jail for three years for his third-of-an-ounce of cannabis - just like the hard-nosed smuggler of eleven pounds of cocaine.

Again we ask, where is the justice? And again we ask, is there no one in the whole of our dear land who can or will lift a hand to help this unfortunate fellow?

If this were politics no doubt there would be scores of screamers for justice ... but this is not politics, it's just humanity, and thus the voices, it seems, all remain silent.

God help us all.

Yours faithfully,

Peter Pernival-Luck

Manmohan Singh

Alan Segayah

TheLawSociety@aol.com