Raphael John-Lall

The crime prob­lem in Trinidad and To­ba­go is not as bad as many peo­ple make it out to be, says Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie.

"There is a sense that when we look at the print and elec­tron­ic me­dia that we are in dan­ger," he said. "Per­son­al­ly, I don't think it is as bad some­times as we think it is. But be­cause we are a small so­ci­ety there is no anonymi­ty to crime." He said be­cause of the fear that ex­ists, some mem­bers of so­ci­ety use this to in­tim­i­date those who par­tic­i­pate in the le­gal process. "And be­cause of that, there are those in our so­ci­ety who would seek to sub­vert the ad­min­is­tra­tion of jus­tice by fear and in­tim­i­da­tion ei­ther of wit­ness, ju­rors or ju­di­cial of­fi­cers," he said. "Over the years, there has been calls for clos­er at­ten­tion to be made to the se­cu­ri­ty of ju­di­cial of­fi­cers. We have been sub­ject­ed to threats and, on oc­ca­sions, at­tacks, in­clud­ing fire­bomb­ing." The Chief Jus­tice was speak­ing at the first quar­ter­ly lun­cheon of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, West­moor­ings, yes­ter­day. "I am ad­vised that leg­is­la­tion is soon to be in­tro­duced that would per­mit tri­als by judge alone, where there is cred­i­ble ev­i­dence of pre­vi­ous or at­tempt­ed or like­ly ju­ry tam­per­ing," he said.

"If this is in­tro­duced, it will in­crease the gen­er­al threat lev­els for us judges." Archie crit­i­cised pub­lic of­fi­cials who whip up pub­lic sen­ti­ment against the ju­di­cia­ry. "Whip­ping up pub­lic opin­ion against the ju­di­cia­ry is very dan­ger­ous and per­sons in pub­lic life should re­sist the temp­ta­tion to pur­sue," he said. He added that the pri­vate sec­tor need­ed to sup­port an in­de­pen­dent ju­di­cia­ry. "The pri­vate sec­tor should be the leader in cham­pi­oning an in­de­pen­dent and ac­count­able ju­di­cia­ry in T&T...You must en­sure an ac­count­able and trans­par­ent in­sti­tu­tion," he said. Archie point­ed out that mag­is­trates in T&T were un­der pres­sure be­cause of their heavy work­load. "The 60 or so mag­is­trates we have dis­pose of be­tween 80,000 and 90,000 cas­es a year," he said. "It's quite a re­mark­able achieve­ment...We have to bear in mind that the ju­di­cial of­fi­cers are un­der tremen­dous pres­sure."

Archie added that a more ef­fi­cient court sys­tem was be­ing cre­at­ed in T&T. "The mod­ern court en­vi­ron­ment that we are cre­at­ing al­so in­cludes en­hanced case man­age­ment and au­dio record­ing dig­i­tal sys­tems and those have be­gun to im­pact on the back­log of cas­es which we know to be a ma­jor con­cern," he said.