Swabbing for Gunshot Residue
Now here is an interesting one. I was reading how the six men who were arrested at the time of the Canterbury gunbattle last October were set free and I came across this little titbit.
The attorney explained that the swab test results for three of the men found that their hands had elevated levels of gunshot residue. Two others’ test results were negative while the sixth man was not swabbed.“Interestingly two policemen said in their testimonies that they discharged their firearms during the incident, their hands were swabbed and sent for testing. But their results came back negative,” he added.
(taken from this news item)
People, heres the deal in a nutshell… when someone fires a gun, various gases get on the hand of the person. This residue remains there for a few days unless special efforts have been made to wash it off. Swabbing for gunshot residue is the process by which the authorities test for the presence of these gases. The presence of this residue suggests rather strongly that the person whose hands the residue was on has fired a gun recently and this type of information is used in many, many murder trials in Jamaica, and so I find it horrendous to think that the responsible parties back home may not have been performing this process properly, as is suggested by that excerpt above.
Think of all the people who may have been wrongfully jailed and even put on death row because of faulty information given by the Police laboratory, or whatever they call the people who administer these tests! It is frightening, to say the least! 
I hope the human rights groups Jamaicans for Justice and “Families against State Terrorism” (FAST) have taken note of this, and that they press for something to be done about it! We must be certain that this gunshot residue swabbing procedure is being properly done and that it works!
Awoah! 
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