Banana thief sent to jail for three months

From mangoes to bananas, and possibly five fingers, one man’s fruit thievery has been halted by the court.

Alwin Westfield of Rose Place, was charged before the Kingstown Magistrate’s Court last Friday that he did, on December 7, 2017, steal two bunches of green bananas worth EC$120 from Molescia Phillips of Edinboro.

The complainant, in the facts read out by the police, informed that there were some banana plants on her land, and one had two bunches of green bananas on it. The complainant was in her shop, when she said she observed Westfield in her neighbour’s yard picking breadfruit.

The next thing she saw after the defendant left her neighbour’s yard was that he was now on her property with a white flour sack in hand. After this, the complainant noticed that her banana tree had been stripped bare of its two bunches of bananas. She apparently found the defendant with bananas in his sack.
The 43-year-old unemployed defendant had one previous conviction in 2016. He nodded in remembrance to Senior Magistrate Rickie Burnett who had informed him of this, saying something about five fingers.

However, the Magistrate indicated that the five fingers were not on the record. “What about mangoes?” he asked the defendant, who remembered these also with an “Oh yeah.”
Westfield asked the Magistrate for time to pay back the sum of money, which engendered some discussion on the impossibility of sentencing such matters.
Burnett commented that he had been seeing such a situation for a while, that persons who commit “these crimes” come to court and ask the court to let them pay for what was stolen.
He asked defence attorney Ronald Marks, as the “son of a part-time farmer” what his thoughts on these matters were.

Marks was adamant that in these cases people “don’t realize the effect it has on the farmer…it discourages people [from going] into farming.”
Citing these types of crimes as “serious” ones, Marks stressed that the farmer is depending on harvests to feed his/her family, and that people do not realize that “farmers plan things.” He gave an example that they may say that when the dasheen is reaped, the roof would be fixed.

“Wish there was another way than to send them to prison…but what else should I do with him?” the Senior Magistrate commented. The defendant had been asked to pay compensation when he was before the court previously.

He noted that some people had suggested that he let the person work with the farmer, “but the farmer would not want a thief to work for him.”
Marks agreed with this, saying that he (the farmer) would not want him around at all.

“The court ordered you to pay compensation in 2016…in 2018 you will go to prison for three months,” Burnett stated.
Westfield plodded back to the prisoner’s bay. When seated, another prisoner said something to him and he smiled in response. The relaxed defendant closed his eyes in an apparent attempt to sleep before going to prison.

When going in the transport he used a t-shirt to cover his head but a fellow prisoner kept pulling it off his head, joking “Y’all want ‘Banana man’?”