Ke­jan Haynes

Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie and the Law As­so­ci­a­tion are both in agree­ment there is a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act when deal­ing with bail.

The Chief Jus­tice ac­knowl­edged the un­ease of much of the pop­u­la­tion and more re­cent­ly, Cari­com lead­ers feel with the con­cept of al­low­ing bail for mur­der charges. The top­ic was raised sev­er­al times by Prime Min­is­ters Mot­t­ley and Gon­salves at the re­gion­al sym­po­sium on vi­o­lence.

Speak­ing to re­porters on day two of the re­gion­al sym­po­sium, CJ Archie said the Ju­di­cia­ry is do­ing “the best bal­anc­ing act” it can, with the hope that by re­duc­ing the time it takes to get mat­ters through the sys­tem, it should al­le­vi­ate some of the con­cerns about bail.

“We have to bal­ance that (vi­o­lent crime) against the fact that per­sons ac­cused of crimes still en­joy a pre­sump­tion of in­no­cence. And we al­so have to look at a par­tic­u­lar type of of­fend­er. And we al­so have to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of re­of­fend­ing. And by the way, those are things that have al­ways been in the bail law.”

He said the judg­ment writ­ten last year by the Court of Ap­peal which was up­held by the Privy Coun­cil, sim­ply recog­nised that.

“Do we get it right all the time? Maybe not,” Archie con­tin­ued. “But is it ac­cept­able for some­one to spend many years in prison and then be ac­quit­ted? I don't think any­body would be hap­py with that, ei­ther.”

Archie not­ed that de­spite the change in the law, there hasn’t been a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of mur­der ac­cused ac­tu­al­ly be­ing grant­ed bail.

“At some lev­el, we need to trust our ju­di­cial of­fi­cers to ex­er­cise dis­cre­tion,” he said. “ I think you're on a slip­pery con­sti­tu­tion­al slope when you let any agency oth­er than the ju­di­cia­ry de­cide on peo­ple's free­doms. "

Mean­while the Law As­so­ci­a­tion in a state­ment was in step with the CJ’s com­ments.

The state­ment read, “Per­sons charged with an of­fense who are de­nied bail, al­ways run the risk of be­ing de­prived of their lib­er­ty for the in­creas­ing­ly long pe­ri­ods it takes for a case to come to tri­al and then to be ex­on­er­at­ed at the con­clu­sion of the tri­al process. This is why the Con­sti­tu­tion al­so guar­an­tees the right not to be de­nied rea­son­able bail with­out just cause.”

They said Judges and mag­is­trates have an un­en­vi­able task of weigh­ing a per­son’s right to lib­er­ty against the pub­lic in­ter­est. They said there would have been oc­ca­sions where peo­ple re­leased on bail have gone on to en­gage in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

“But that is no rea­son to cas­ti­gate judges and mag­is­trates for do­ing the job the Con­sti­tu­tion re­quires them to do and for up­hold­ing the sa­cred con­sti­tu­tion­al rights to which we are all en­ti­tled,” the state­ment said.

They said the ju­di­cia­ry must re­main open to con­struc­tive crit­i­cism, “but ran­dom and un­rea­soned ridicule will serve on­ly to un­der­mine con­fi­dence.”