EDITORIAL - Get on with it, judges

We hope the House will quickly take up, and approve, the bill that was recently passed by the Senate to eliminate preliminary inquiries before magistrates ahead of certain types of cases, including murders, being tried in the Supreme Court.

Often these hearings turn into almost full-blown trials and are used by defence lawyers, the cynics will argue, for a wearying and strategic prolongation of legal proceedings.

Whatever the intent of defence and prosecution attorneys at preliminary inquiries, two things are evident about the process. First is the point of duplication. The matters, essentially, are tried twice.

The second point, which relates to the first, preliminary inquiries waste a fair bit of the time of courts and contribute to the nearly half a million backlog of cases in Jamaica's judicial system. In that sense, they play a part in the denial of justice.

Allowing magistrates to review documentary pleadings to determine whether cases should go forward to a higher court would help speed up the process. We are, however, not so naive as to believe the law, when passed, will fix the chronic inefficiencies in the judicial system.

There is need for much effort all round to beat this problem, including, we insist, greater management competence on the part of our judges.

To be clear, this newspaper acknowledges that as among the institutional strengths of Jamaica is the fact that we have maintained an essentially uncorrupted judiciary. There is hardly any doubt that the men and women of the bench are jurisprudentially competent.

They, however, we feel, have been absolutely poor at the job of getting cases through their courts in a timely manner and/or negotiating the resources to help them to do so.

In that regard, Jamaicans are absolutely fed up with the judicial system. They perceive no rational reason for a case to take a decade or more to work its way through the courts.

Judges and justice system managers will agree that such delay erodes confidence in the judicial process, contributes to a breakdown in law and order, and is bad for investment and economic growth. An important predicate of a thriving capitalist system is a competent and efficient legal system, which helps to underpin order by quickly arbitrating disputes.

PROSECUTORIAL BAR WEAK

Jamaican judges can reasonably argue that, on the criminal side, the system gets little help from the prosecutorial bar. Its image is decidedly frumpy. The population's perception is that defence attorneys are far more savvy and prepared than their prosecutorial counterparts, around whom they seem capable of running procedural rings.

The elimination of preliminary inquiries will be a start in the rebalancing. We appreciate that any fix will also have to include additional resources being channelled to the court system: more and improved technology, more judges, more courtrooms and so on.

But it also requires judges taking charge of their courtrooms, setting deadlines for cases to begin and end, and sticking by them. Further, a hard and cold decision has to be taken about the backlog of cases.

Our recommendation is that except for a few, which may demand special attention, the court system begins to operate on a current basis - hearing the cases that come before it now. The rest can be heard as time and resources permit.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.