A blot on justice

IN OUR VIEW, the streams of justice must not only flow unpolluted but also unimpeded. Over the years, one of our main criticisms of the justice system has been its tardiness, the fact that some cases took too long to come to trial and, as a consequence, litigants and accused persons were being denied the justice that was their due. To the credit of our courts and judges, successful efforts have been made to reduce the backlog of matters and speed up the delivery of justice.

Unfortunately, however, that effort was never effectively extended to the Magistrates' Courts which handle more than 80 percent of the litigation occurring in Trinidad and Tobago. That is why we must now commend the action being taken by Chief Justice Sat Sharma to deal with delinquent magistrates whose lack of performance in appeal matters amounts to what he has described as "a blot on the administration of justice".

Because of the failure of many magistrates to provide written reasons for their court decisions, the appeals filed by convicted persons could not be listed for hearing. The Chief Justice condemned this delinquency on Monday when, presiding over the Appeal Court, he had before him the case of Joan Ajim who had filed her appeal in 1988 after she was convicted for possession of marijuana by a magistrate and sentenced to three years in prison. Mr Sharma also noted that a number of magisterial matters coming before the Appeal Court on Monday dated back to the late 1980s and early 1990s.

We must share the indignation of the Chief Justice over such a scandalous state of affairs. Every citizen has the right to appeal against decisions of judges and magistrates and, since most convicted persons would have been sent to jail, nothing should be done to prevent or retard their appeals being heard in reasonably quick time. That such matters should take as long as ten and 15 years to be heard, sometimes longer than the actual prison term served by the appellant, is quite ridiculous. But the situation becomes more intolerable when the blame for this delay lies with magistrates who fail to provide written reasons for their decisions.

We must endorse the measures which Mr Sharma has taken to remedy this problem. First, he has requested the Judicial and Legal Service Commission not to consider any magistrate for promotion unless and until he or she has concluded their part-heard matters and given written reasons for their decisions in appeal cases. Also, the CJ has instructed that all magisterial matters, with or without the magistrates' reasons and notes of evidence, should be listed for hearing in order to avoid any further miscarriage of justice. However, we wonder about the evenness of this latter measure since the judges of the Appeal Court will not have the thinking of the trial magistrate to guide them in adjudicating the case. Their task may even be more difficult without the magistrate's notes of evidence.

It seems to us that magistrates who have been chronic or habitual in this kind of delinquency, actually obstructing the course of justice, should be brought before the JLSC for more serious discipline, perhaps lengthy suspensions if not dismissal. But apart from dealing with the performance of magistrates, the Chief Justice must also seek to upgrade the outdated system operating in the lower courts, most notably the tedious practice of magistrates recording the evidence of trials in their own handwriting. Often the court's clerk-typists have problems decifering these hand-written notes and, when they are promoted or go on leave, this job remains undone. Our magistracy must be an efficient place for the administration of justice; the CJ must strive to make it so.