Two se­nior Ju­di­cia­ry staff have joined in the heat­ed pub­lic de­bate be­tween Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie and Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions (DPP) Roger Gas­pard, SC, over the chron­ic de­lays in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.

In a press re­lease is­sued yes­ter­day, act­ing Supreme Court Reg­is­trar Ker­ri-Ann Oliv­er­ie-Stu­art and Deputy Court Ex­ec­u­tive Ad­min­is­tra­tor for the Crim­i­nal Di­vi­sion Vanes­sa Gar­cia sought to re­spond to state­ments made by Gas­pard in his re­lease on Archie’s com­ments dur­ing his an­nu­al ad­dress at the open­ing of the 2020/2021 Law Term.

“While the Ju­di­cia­ry has no de­sire to en­ter in­to a de­bate on the is­sues, we the un­der­signed feel com­pelled to state the mat­ter for the sake of the record and wish to clar­i­fy,” they said.

They main­ly took aim at Gas­pard’s com­plaint that his of­fice was on­ly able to file 12 in­dict­ments, for cas­es which have passed the pre­lim­i­nary in­quiry stage, over the past year.

They ex­plained that in April last year, the Chief Mag­is­trate ap­proached Gas­pard’s of­fice to sug­gest the elec­tron­ic trans­fer of doc­u­ments re­lat­ed to com­plet­ed pre­lim­i­nary in­quiries.

They claimed that elec­tron­ic trans­fer was sug­gest­ed due to the fi­nan­cial costs and de­lays as­so­ci­at­ed with print­ing mul­ti­ple copies of the vo­lu­mi­nous doc­u­ments, but the DPP’s Of­fice re­fused to move away from the tra­di­tion­al pa­per trans­fer.

hile they stat­ed that the Ju­di­cia­ry had agreed to pro­vide pa­per copies for some cas­es and al­lowed the tra­di­tion­al fil­ing of those, they claimed that the DPP’s Of­fice did not fol­low the prop­er pro­ce­dure of no­ti­fi­ca­tion be­fore at­tempt­ing to utilise the ser­vice and was re­fused.

“While there may be sev­er­al fac­tors which con­tributed to the low num­ber of mat­ters filed by you, to sug­gest that it is due to the Ju­di­cia­ry “reneg­ing on an arrange­ment to ac­cept, oth­er­wise than by elec­tron­ic means, the tra­di­tion­al fil­ing of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 450 com­mit­tals and re­lat­ed in­dict­ments, to­geth­er with tran­scripts” is patent­ly un­true,” they said.

Turn­ing to Gas­pard’s al­le­ga­tion that Archie was disin­gen­u­ous in his crit­i­cism of the low fil­ing rate as he did not con­sid­er that his of­fice filed be­tween 150 and 300 in­dict­ments a year over the past decade, they point­ed out that in 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 46 and 48 in­dict­ments were filed.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it is not an aber­ra­tion as sug­gest­ed by you but a trou­bling trend show­ing a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion over a three year pe­ri­od from 2017-2020 which war­rants ur­gent re­view of the sys­tem,” they said.

They claimed that the is­sue with the late fil­ing of in­dict­ments arose short­ly af­ter the Ju­di­cia­ry in­tro­duced reg­u­lar sta­tus hear­ings for filed cas­es in an at­tempt to ac­tive­ly ad­dress the back­log.

They high­light­ed the case of a man, who ex­pressed a de­sire to plead guilty to an of­fence but had to wait three years for the DPP’s Of­fice to file his in­dict­ment for it to be processed by a judge.

Re­fer­ring to Gas­pard’s com­ments on the role of judges in sug­gest­ing plea bar­gain­ing, they sug­gest­ed that the DPP is the main agent in the process.

“With ac­tive, or­gan­ised and dis­ci­plined use of the var­i­ous case man­age­ment tools by the Of­fice of the DPP, de­fence coun­sel and the court, the crim­i­nal back­log can be dras­ti­cal­ly re­duced and we look for­ward to your ac­tive sup­port in achiev­ing this goal,” they said.

They in­vit­ed the DPP’s Of­fice to make arrange­ments for the doc­u­ments re­lat­ed to al­most 1,000 out­stand­ing cas­es to be brought in­to the Ju­di­cia­ry to be scanned and filed.

They al­so of­fered as­sis­tance in train­ing staff to use the Ju­di­cia­ry’s new elec­tron­ic sys­tems.

Derek Achong