Troy mob killing of alleged child assailant raises questions on how Jamaica prosecutes crowd violence

A 10-year-old girl in Troy, Trelawny, was sexually assaulted and killed on Tuesday, and her alleged attacker was later killed by residents in a mob attack, renewing debate over so-called jungle justice and how the courts should treat it.

Police later detained a person alleged to have taken part in the assault on the accused man. Residents mounted a protest in Troy calling for his release and chanting for justice. Reports reaching CVM said the dead man's father was seriously injured and remains in hospital under police guard.

Director of Public Prosecutions Claudette Thompson told CVM's Lead Story that Jamaican law has no separate crime called mob killing or mob murder. Suspects are instead charged jointly with murder, she said, adding that a file on the Troy matter had not yet reached her office and that what she knew came from media reports.

Thompson said she had also considered whether such an attack could be pursued as a gang offence. Under the criminal-organisation provisions, she explained, a gang can be defined as three or more people whose purpose includes committing a crime, with no requirement that the group be long-standing or even pre-planned. Spur-of-the-moment joint action with shared intent can meet that definition, she said. She recalled a successful prosecution involving several members of the Deans family in St. Ann who killed a young man from their community.

Defence attorney Alexander Shaw said officers arrest those for whom they have evidence, so charging one person after a crowd attack is not automatically unfair. He warned that eyewitnesses are often scarce when a community believes the violence was justified, and likened mob killings to extrajudicial killings — communities acting as judge, jury and executioner on assumption rather than proven fact. Those who reject police taking the law into their own hands, he argued, must also reject residents doing the same; both are equally wrong.

Thompson stressed that Jamaica has secured convictions where several people were charged together for murder and other offences, even though the statute books do not label any charge "mob killing."