There is a line between justice and vengeance. In the hallowed halls of Guyana’s courts, that line appears blurred when Justice Navindra Singh takes the bench. His name evokes fear not only among the accused but within the legal fraternity itself. Some refer to him as “the prosecution’s judge.” Others say he is a law unto himself. And for many families devastated by the kind of punitive sentencing most associate with retribution, not rehabilitation, there is a growing consensus that something deeper, something personal, might be driving his judicial philosophy.
How else can we understand a man who imposed a life sentence plus flogging for a wounding charge? Or the decision to sentence a convicted shooter to life without parole despite the withdrawal of a key attempted murder charge? Or the infamous 202-year sentence in the Neesa Gopaul case, legally symbolic, perhaps, but loaded with performative finality. In a justice system already bruised by delay and bias, the idea of one man imposing his will with such severity demands careful examination.
To understand Justice Singh’s courtroom, we must first understand the man. His childhood was marked by a tragedy few could ever imagine, his elder brother kidnapped and brutally murdered when Singh was only ten. He has recounted the incident with a distant kind of restraint, but trauma has a way of leaving its fingerprints on everything we become. When one’s first intimate experience with crime ends in horror and loss, it is not difficult to imagine how the concept of justice transforms into something both deeply personal and deeply moralistic. It stops being about balance and becomes about reckoning.
Singh is no mere legal technician. He is brilliant, articulate, driven. A member of Mensa. A fierce debater. A scholar of science turned legal warrior. His rise was swift and earned. But brilliance alone does not shield a man from the seduction of ego. From observers, colleagues, and even defence attorneys, there are whispers that Justice Singh’s courtroom is less a forum for law than a theatre for dominance. He is known to go outside of sentencing norms. He is known to lecture defendants in tones of finality. He challenges their credibility, mocks their defences, and adds punitive years for what he calls “disrespect to the court.” To critics, this is ego disguised as jurisprudence.
But what makes Singh’s approach so enduring, and dangerous, is the psychology of public acceptance that surrounds it. Too many Guyanese have internalized the idea that the system is unfixable, and so they find a strange comfort in judges who impose order by any means necessary. For a society where crime is high, justice is slow, and public safety is fragile, Singh’s sentences feel like justice, even when they are excessive. We’ve been trained to believe that the harsher the penalty, the more righteous the outcome. But justice that is not fair, not measured, and not consistent with precedent is not justice at all, it is authoritarianism in robes.
This psychological submission to power is exactly what allows institutions like our judiciary to drift unchecked. Citizens fear the system but have little faith in it. The poor, in particular, know the weight of the gavel falls heavier on them. They are told to accept it. They are told that fairness is a luxury, not a right. And when they see men like Ganesh Dhanraj sentenced to 39 years for a stabbing, while others convicted of far more serious crimes receive far less, they start to question whether justice is truly blind, or merely cruel.
What does it mean when a sitting High Court judge routinely sentences people to decades behind bars for lesser crimes? When he adds years for lying in court, a right every accused person has under due process? When he describes defendants as “unfit for rehabilitation” because of age or attitude? It means we are no longer dealing with a judge; we are dealing with a moral adjudicator, someone who sees his courtroom as a place for punishment, not just law.
And yet, we must ask, where is the oversight? In the Caribbean, legal precedents lean toward proportionality. The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court guidelines and even Caribbean Court of Justice rulings emphasize judicial restraint, especially in non-capital cases. In Guyana, however, judges like Singh are effectively unchecked, and the absence of a strong judicial review culture means their sentencing patterns go largely unchallenged.
This should alarm every Guyanese. Because when one man can shape the fates of so many with so little transparency or challenge, we are no longer living under a rule of law, we are living under the shadow of judicial absolutism. And it doesn’t stop at the accused. Every family, every community, every citizen who places trust in the judiciary to be fair and proportional is betrayed when that trust becomes a stage for performance punishment.
We must fight for a judicial system that is firm but fair. That recognizes the importance of consequence, but never at the cost of justice. Judges are not gods. They are not executioners. They are servants of the law, and when they forget that, it is the people who must remind them.
We owe it to our children to fix what is broken. To reform a system that permits unchecked harshness. To build a nation where justice is not feared, but respected. We owe them a future in which the courts reflect wisdom, not wrath.
Let us envision a judiciary that listens before it condemns, that rehabilitates before it casts away, and that upholds the rule of law, not the rule of personality. Let us demand sentencing guidelines that are binding. Let us call for psychological evaluations of judges who wield extraordinary power with extraordinary fury. Let us build a justice system that believes in mercy, rehabilitation, and proportionality.
Guyana cannot be truly free until its justice system is just. And no citizen, rich or poor, guilty or accused, should be made to suffer under the weight of one man’s unresolved trauma, ego, or excess. It is time to look critically at those who wield power and to ask: are they upholding the Constitution, or themselves? And if the answer is the latter, then it is our duty, as citizens of a free republic, to act.
