Last week, it was announced that one of the three men accused of the home invasion and robbery of Deputy Prime Minister Philip Brave Davis and his wife had been granted bail.
The case is obviously high profile and also highly symbolic. Davis was serving as acting prime minister at the time; as such, the incident stood as a potent sign that violent crime had penetrated to the highest reaches of our society.
Everyone agrees that we have a serious problem with criminality in The Bahamas. We are not so unified, however, when it comes to the question of who to blame.
Broadly speaking, when it comes to the politics of crime, over the past several years, opposition parties have tended to blame the sitting administration, while governments have shown a tendency to place responsibility on the judiciary, in particular for the granting of bail to those accused of serious violent crimes like murder, rape and armed robbery.
The current Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) administration recently passed the Bail Amendment Act in an effort to "radically reduce" the number of cases in which accused persons can assert their matter was not tried within a reasonable period of time.
The new law requires judges to take witness safety into consideration when determining whether to grant bail. Yet so far this year, there have been 118 murders, compared to the 109 murders on record at this time last year. Many of these continue to be retaliation killings and many of the victims continue to be accused persons recently released on bail.
Before condemning the judiciary for being soft on accused persons, however, we should all keep in mind the reason bail is granted in most of these cases. It is precisely the phenomenon the new Bail Amendment Act seeks to address: the inordinately long period that individuals on remand must await their day in court.
The Davis matter is case in point: The armed robbery occurred in December 2013 and three suspects were detained soon after. Now, 12 months later, they remain untried, unconvicted, yet in custody. They are not scheduled to be tried for nearly another year.
Judges, in accordance with the constitution, are duty-bound to treat every individual who comes before them as innocent until proven guilty. The idea of innocent men and women spending two, three or sometimes four-plus years incarcerated is clearly intolerable.
And while the backlog of cases, which leads to such unreasonable delays in justice, is not totally the fault of the Office of the Attorney General, it is important to keep in mind that it was this current government that promised "Swift Justice". It was also this government that promised to dramatically increase the number of courts hearing criminal cases. These courts have been physically completed but are not yet functional.
The fact that neither promise has been achieved after more than two-and-a-half years of governance should give pause to politicians who seek to once again lay the full blame for crime at the feet of our judiciary.

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