CLA News / Towards a Fairer Justice: The Turks and Caicos Islands’ New Sentencing Guidelines By Mark A. Fulford, President, Turks and Caicos Islands Bar Council

On 19 September 2025, during our Judicial Education Institute (JEI) Week, the Honourable Chief Justice Mabel Agyemang launched the first-ever Sentencing Guidelines of the Turks and Caicos Islands. It was the Chief Justice who led and formally launched this reform. That distinction matters. Judicial leadership at the point where principles become practice signals to the public and to the profession that sentencing is not merely administrative housekeeping but a constitutional commitment to fairness, transparency, and equality before the law.

What We Are Solving For

In small jurisdictions like ours, law is lived at close quarters. A single sentence can ripple across a community, felt not through newsprint but at kitchen tables and church steps. For years, judges in the TCI have discharged their duties with care and integrity, yet they did so without a shared framework that could structure discretion and explain outcomes in a uniform, accessible way. Discretion is essential; disparity is not. The guidelines meet that challenge. They aim to make like cases more likely to result in like sentences, while preserving the ability of judges to account for the unique facts and the personal circumstances of both victim and offender.

Structuring Discretion, Not Replacing It

Sentencing guidelines are sometimes misunderstood as rigid tariffs. They are not. Properly designed, they provide principled steps, gravity of the offence, culpability, harm, aggravating and mitigating factors, personal circumstances, pleas, and ancillary orders, through which judges reason transparently. The public interest is served twice over: first, through proportionality (the sentence fits the crime), and second, through legibility (the reasons can be followed). In appellate terms, structure reduces error; in democratic terms, it builds trust.

A Commonwealth Conversation

The TCI now joins a broader Commonwealth conversation in which jurisdictions have moved, at different speeds and with different models, toward structured sentencing. England and Wales have demonstrated how guideline architecture can evolve iteratively with data and experience. In the Caribbean, jurisdictions such as Jamaica have adopted frameworks that pursue consistency while respecting judicial independence. Our contribution is to show how a micro-jurisdiction can design and implement such a framework in a way that is both resource-sensitive and constitutionally sound. We will borrow what works, adapt what fits, and, in time, offer insights of our own to peers across the region.

Constitutional and Human Rights Lens

At its core, sentencing engages the rule of law and the right to a fair hearing. Guidelines operationalise equality before the law by reducing unjustified disparity and improving the predictability of outcomes. They also reinforce open justice: when the route to the sentence can be explained in accessible steps, the public can scrutinise the reasoning rather than speculate about it. In a jurisdiction where communities track judicial outcomes closely, that transparency is not a luxury; it is a safeguard against cynicism.

Craftsmanship and Leadership

The launch by the Chief Justice Agyemang reflects careful judicial craftsmanship. The Bar’s role, both defence and prosecution is to ensure the guidelines are lived in submissions, not simply cited in footnotes. For prosecutors, consistency in recommendations is as important as consistency in charging. For defence counsel, principled mitigation within the guideline architecture is advocacy at its highest: it invites the court to see the person as well as the offence, and to reason openly about mercy, rehabilitation, and proportionality.

Capacity, Training, and Public Education

Guidelines only work if they are understood and used well. That requires three investments:

1. Judicial and Bar Training: Workshops that move beyond “what the text says” to “how the reasoning flows,” with practical scenarios and sentencing exercises.
2. Public Communication: Clear, non-technical explanations of how the guidelines work, why factors matter, and how appellate oversight fits into the architecture.
3. Data and Feedback Loops: Systematic capture of sentencing outcomes to detect drift, disparity, or unforeseen effects, so revisions can be evidence-led rather than anecdote-driven.

These are not add-ons; they are the engine room of a living instrument.

Implementation: Principles Into Practice

From the Bar Council’s vantage point, three practical commitments will guide implementation:

• Consistency of Advocacy: Encourage members to structure submissions around the guideline steps, anchoring arguments in culpability, harm, and identified factors, with principled reference to comparators.
• Early Resolution and Efficiency: Where the guidelines yield greater predictability, earlier and more realistic pleas may follow—benefitting victims, conserving court time, and focusing trials on the truly contestable issues.
• Review and Revision: A 12–24 month review horizon should be built in from the outset. Guidelines must be nimble enough to respond to new offence patterns, evolving social harms, and feedback from the Bench and Bar.

A Personal Reflection

As a practitioner and President of the Bar Council, standing at the launch during JEI Week felt less like witnessing a procedural update and more like marking a cultural shift. We have had spirited debates in our legal community about what fairness requires and how to express it. The guidelines do not end those debates; they civilise them. They give us a shared language in which to argue respectfully, rigorously, and transparently about what justice demands in each case.

What Comes Next

Our next steps are clear. We must embed the guidelines through training, measure their effects with care, and keep the public informed. We should also continue the regional dialogue, through the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and our Caribbean colleagues, on how small jurisdictions can implement structured sentencing without losing the human, fact-sensitive character of justice. If we succeed, we will have done more than introduce a document; we will have strengthened a culture.

The Chief Justice has set the direction. It is now for the Bench, the Bar, and the wider justice system to walk that path together, deliberately, transparently, and with an eye always on proportionality and dignity. In doing so, we honour the rule of law not as a slogan, but as a daily discipline.

By Mark A. Fulford, President, Turks and Caicos Islands Bar Council