NOW that the Supreme Court has seen fit to legalise murder in Bermuda, the tragedy that occurred outside the Southampton Post Office earlier this week should not have come as any great surprise.

It was only a matter of when, not if, another crime of brutal violence would occur in an island that has been sleepwalking while most of the machinery of its criminal justice system has imploded. What remains, a riot of mismatched parts that appear to have been surplus to Rube Goldberg's requirements, has seized up from both lack of use and lack of proper maintenance.

The criminal justice system's effectiveness and credibility have been thoroughly compromised through the usual Bermudian mixed salad of official indifference, ineptidude and insufficient funding.

Now it seems that only a combination of luck and the law of averages can prevent elderly women from being critically injured while collecting their pension cheques or young men from having their lifeblood drain away into the gutters of parking lots at take-out restaurants.

Bermuda can expect little else given an increasingly addled Attorney General who upbraids prosecutors on the floor of the House of Assembly for attempting to secure convictions against criminals, a Director of Public Prosecutions who cannot hang a simple possession charge on a confessed large-scale drug importer and a Police Service that is leaching talent and experience from the senior ranks while remaining a revolving door at the entry-level.

It was hoped that the Rebecca Middleton tragedy would have served as the shrillest of wake-up calls to Bermuda's somnolent authorities. A teenage visitor is raped, tortured in a manner that would not have shamed the professionally trained sadists of the Gestapo and finally killed. No one is convicted of murder.

But tragedy metastasised into a piquant brand of black comedy when the Serious Crimes Commission was empanelled.

Nominally appointed to investigate the Middleton killing and recommend ways to prevent a repetition of that official train-wreck which claimed the reputations of the police, prosecutors and the jury system, in reality its mandate was to engage in white-washing and face-saving.

This commission was a taxpayer-subsidised exercise in the evasion of responsibility. Its hearings amounted to a type of debased public theatre in which the lead actors clumsily zig-zagged their way around accountability in much the same way amateur thespians try to avoid colliding with the scenery. The over-rehearsed pieties uttered by those called before the commission answered nothing except any nagging questions Bermudians might have had about whether you can, in fact, teach old bureaucratic and law enforcement parrots new lines.

The last Governor, a wretched little mediocrity who spent a lifetime clinging to the lower rungs of the career diplomacy ladder before being posted to Bermuda, had neither the qualifications nor the will to do what was necessary following the Middleton murder.

Given that almost his first action upon arrival here was to engineer the enforced resignation of the Police Commissioner, throwing out the root-and-branch Police Restructuring plan along with Colin Coxall, the Serious Crimes Commission was predestined to conform to a uniquely callow understanding of how Government House could best exercise its reserve powers on internal security.

Consequently, the official probe into the Middleton murder was not so much an opportunity for meaningful reform that was lost as one that was wilfully squandered.

Instead of serving as a catalyst for transforming the Police Service and the Attorney General's Chambers, instead of ushering in a long overdue review of Bermuda's entire criminal justice system, the official dunghill associated with the Middleton inquiry and prosecutions was essentially left in situ.

Ornamenting this compost of ineptitude and inaction with some carefully placed floral tributes in the form of official expressions of regret by the commissioners did nothing to camouflage its essential rankness or, for that matter, to provide belated justice for a teenage girl who was the victim of slaughterhouse-style butchery.

What the poet called the ever whirling wheels of change ground to a shuddering halt in Bermuda when there was both the chance and the demonstrable need for the island to re-engineer its criminal justice system. Reform was sidelined in favour of maintaining a manifestly unworkable status quo, a status quo the watered-down recommendations finally produced by the commissioners were not going to materially alter even if any of them had ever been enacted.

The final report was intended to draw an official line under the Middleton tragedy without actually assigning culpability for the fiasco. So since there were no individual or institutional failings identified by the commission, their report could hardly contain a blueprint for remedying them. The neutered document produced by the commission was eventually forwarded to Government House. Presumably the then-Governor got around to reading it when he wasn't busy filing the more politically embarrassing written submissions made to the commission into his shredder.

Fast forward to the present day.

Last week a Supreme Court jury solemnly returned a verdict in the Ice Queen murder case predicated on the assumption that a weapon could insert itself into the body of young man without any human agency being involved - surely a first, even by Bermuda's increasingly delusional standards.

Not only did the jury's decision make a mockery of the law of the land it also defied all of the known laws of physics. The bayonet-style weapon that ended up sheathed in Tekle Mallory's body seemingly got there by itself. Either that, or he committed suicide without any of the dozens of witnesses who did see an assault on Tekle Mallory by a knife-wielding assailant managing to notice. Again, no one is convicted of murder.

That the jury managed to entertain reasonable doubts about how Mr. Mallory came to receive his mortal wounds in part underscores how a slothful community can end up with the criminal system that it deserves. This is an island where too many bright, capable people opt out of fulfilling their civic responsibilities with fatuous form letters from employers imploring the courts to have them excused from jury duty. The result is lowest-common denominator jury pools that return verdicts very much subject to the law of diminishing returns.

But events leading up to the verdict highlighted once again the other, very serious deficiencies that exist at the institutional level in the police, the Attorney General's Chambers and the court system, fissures in the edifice of criminal justice that were apparent at the time of the Middleton killing and which have only widened since.

While this Government insists its first priority is addressing the underlying causes of crime, there is clearly a compelling need to address its consequences as well. In view of this latest judicial travesty and the ongoing threat that violent crime poses to this island, Bermuda could do worse than to look at the Justice For All White Paper laid before the House of Commons in London last year for advice on how to proceed.

Outlining a comprehensive overhaul of Britain's antiquated judicial system, the White Paper proposes - among many other things - abolishing the double-jeopardy rule in cases of murder, manslaughter, rape and armed robbery. Given "compelling new evidence", suspects who have previously been acquitted of these crimes could now find themselves in the dock again.

Other recommendations include imposing "indeterminate sentences" for dangerous offenders, rewriting the rules of evidence so a defendant's previous convictions can be revealed during a trial when they are directly relevant to the charges being pursued by prosecutors and, tellingly enough, introducing new punishments for those who attempt to avoid jury duty on less than serious grounds.

There are clearly findings in the UK White Paper that can be tailored to Bermuda's circumstances and applied here in conjunction with institutional reforms which need to be made at Prospect and in the courts. But this will only happen if Government and Government House demonstrate an awareness of just how unmanageable dangerous and violent criminals are making Bermuda along with a commitment to reform that has been conspicuous by its absence in recent years.

Murder needs to be outlawed again. Post haste.