NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Chief Justice Ian Winder yesterday said there was no foreseeable end to the current court backlog unless lawmakers get creative with reforms.
Winder reckoned with concerns that the slow pace of criminal trials, bail management, and a case backlog has contributed to the escalation of violent crime, particularly homicides, durIng an interview with Eyewitness News.
“We can’t try all these cases; it’s not expected that every case that comes before the court system is supposed to be tried,” he said.
“In other jurisdictions, 80 to 90 percent of the cases are resolved either by some plea, during some plea arraignment, or some other means of whether they take a guilty plea.
“[…] but everyone who is in our court system wants to go to trial, whether it’s to run out the clock to see if they can, for whatever reason, the effort is to go to trial but I think the legislature has to be creative, the executive has to be creative and find ways for matters to be settled.”
Winder pointed to considerable setbacks due to the impact of COVID-19 on the court’s ability to hear matters but noted that the backlog issue predates the pandemic.
He said that the court is doing all that it can to efficiently hear cases given its resources, and flagged ongoing efforts to seat at least four new judges in the new year as well as complete the digitization of court records and its eFiling platform.
However, Winder stressed it was only one part of the system that was also dependent on the efficiencies of public prosecutions and defense lawyers and robust legislation.
The chief justice pointed to shortages in criminal lawyers as well as staff at the Department of Public Prosecutions.
Winder said: “We have a very, very small criminal bar. Despite the fact that we have well over a thousand lawyers, a very, very small amount of them practice on the criminal side, because there are so few of them on the criminal side a lot of them are double triple, quadruple booked in respect of hearing dates for trials.”
He continued: “We’re only one part of a system, the Director of Public Prosecutions office as I understand it has considerable staff shortages, which adds considerably to being able to process a lot of these cases through the system effectively.”
“[…] We are in the process of a recruitment drive to try and see at least four to five judges very early in the new year.”
In addition to securing more guilty pleas, Winder noted that shortening the length of criminal trials by moving some procedural steps to the pre-trial period would significantly help in relieving some of the issues that stall proceedings.
“In those instances where the trial is aborted for two weeks, there’s time in there where the judge can be hearing admissibility applications in respective evidence so when the trial comes it’s a very seamless process and it’s not as lengthy.
“A lot of our members of the administration, they’re former attorneys and a lot of them are very creative, I think they can come up with ideas to assist.”
Police have reported a significant amount of murder cases over the past year, involving persons who are out on bail awaiting trial.
National Security Minister Wayne Munroe has also said that a number of persons face court hearings, on a weekly basis due to a breach in their ankle monitoring while on bail. Police reports over the last two weeks show that at least 10 people were arraigned for breaches.
Winder said: “I hear the outcry that if they weren’t on bail they would be safe and sound in Her Majesty’s Prison than dead on the streets, we can speculate all we want but there’s a right to bail if the circumstances allow.
“There is a factor that if there is a risk to the life of the accused that maybe bail may not be the right answer […], but certainly if the evidence was put before the court, to that effect the results would have been different but I’m not sure that, that kind of evidence if it was put before the court, suggest that any of these many persons who died, would otherwise not been the victim of those types of crimes.”
“The society we live in, obviously has changed over time and we all know the causes of a lot of these, the speculations that it’s perhaps, the streets taking their own justice, but we truly do not know,” he said.
Munroe has expressed intent to stage a forum with the judiciary, government, and the Department of Public Prosecutions in an effort to improve efficacy, Winder said.
“I know it’s something he’s trying to put together,” he said.
“There are a lot of challenges and I think all have to come together to try and see if we can find a way out of this problem.”
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