A man who pleaded guilty to possession of a handgun and ammunition will spend the next four years behind bars.<\/p>\n
Jameko Ash, of First Street, The Grove, is the first person to be sentenced to prison since Parliament reintroduced statutory minimums for firearm offenses.<\/p>\n
In 2001, the FNM government abolished minimum sentences with Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham saying they had made a mistake by removing the court\u2019s discretion.<\/p>\n
Ingraham said in Parliament recently that the government decided to reintroduce mandatory minimum sentences because unusual times call for unusual measures.<\/p>\n
Before passing sentence, Gun Court Magistrate Joyann Ferguson-Pratt told Ash that it was the wrong time to be found with a firearm or ammunition as Parliament had intervened because of an increase of violent crimes using firearms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man found in a possession of a firearm will spend four years in prison under the new amended Firearms Act, which came into effect on November 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[32,31,237,49,219],"class_list":["post-14971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-courts","tag-crime","tag-guns","tag-law","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}