Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran says the criminal justice system and the appeal system are in a state of collapse.
In his column in the last Sunday Stabroek, Ramkarran did not assign blame for this but it was clear that he was referring to the PPP/C government’s failure to reconvene the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to enable the appointment of more judges.
Adverting to a seminar om June 24th where a Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) judge made a presentation on `Rethinking Criminal Justice’, Ramkarran delivered a scathing assessment of the present system here.
“It was a timely and important (seminar) because our criminal justice system, like our appeal system, is in a state of collapse. This is no exaggeration because these systems do not deliver justice to the Guyanese citizen in a reasonable time, as provided for in the Constitution. Accused persons are tried years after they are committed to trial. Those on remand have to spend their time in prison. Civil appeals now take about six years to be heard. I hasten to add that this state of affairs is not the fault of judges. They work diligently and under great pressure.
“The state of our judicial system was not created by a natural disaster. It is man-made and there is no hint that any man-made solution will ever be entertained. Up to recently the High Court had twelve appointed judges although the full complement is twenty. Three out of the twelve, twenty-five percent, have recently retired and cannot be replaced because a Judicial Service Commission is not being constituted, although there is no known obstacle to doing so. The Court of Appeal has had only three Judges, out of a complement of five, for over fifteen years. The full complement for the Court of Appeal has been recently increased to nine”, he said.
The JSC has not been reconvened since 2017. When the PPP/C government entered office in August of 2020 this was one of the items on its agenda. To date, despite appeals from the judiciary and other sectors of society the JSC is yet to be reappointed and many excuses have been offered by President Irfaan Ali and Attorney General Anil Nandlall SC.
On January 10th this year, in some of the bluntest language that she had delivered on the subject, the Chancellor of the Judiciary (ag) Yonette Cummings-Edwards made a stirring plea for the urgent reconstituting of the JSC and the appointment of the required number of judges.
Speaking at the ceremonial opening of the Law Year 2023, Justice Cummings-Edwards said: “You have heard the call for more resources, human resources in particular. We need more judges! We need the Judicial Service Commission to be established ASAP – as soon as possible. We are facing increased case loads. Judges are now overburdened, they are exhausted, they are nearly worn out and they are, in some cases, burned out”.
Perhaps in anticipation of more empty promises, the Chancellor went on to add: “We do not need the rhetoric. We need more labourers. We need the judges. We’ve been hearing time and again about the JSC is soon to be established. We would like to see the implementation and the establishment of the Judicial Service Commission”.
What was even more unusual about the Chancellor’s riveting appeal was that it came after Attorney General Nandlall promised that the JSC would be in place long before the end of the first quarter of this year.
Nandlall had said earlier in the proceedings: “I have heard the lamentations, properly made, regarding the shortage of judges. First of all, I want to assure the judiciary and all those present that I am painfully aware of this deficiency. Secondly, I want to congratulate the complement of judges that have not been intimidated by this deficiency but have been able to muster the will to still deliver a system of quality justice to the people of our country”.
He added, “Thirdly, I want to assure that very, very early this year, long before the end of the first quarter of this year, we would have appointed the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission; two important constitutional commissions that will address the inadequacies of human resources that currently plague the juridical institution.”
The second quarter of the year has now expired without the JSC being reappointed.
In his Sunday column Ramkarran noted that at the seminar on June 24 where the presentation was made by CCJ Justice Jacob Wit, one panelist, Justice Jo Ann Barlow, said that shorter trial periods cannot be attained if the number of judicial officers and support staff are not increased. Justice Barlow said: “It is by the grace of the Almighty that we manage to keep the system afloat.”
Ramkarran, a former two-term Speaker of the National Assembly, noted that the main idea forwarded by Justice Wit was of a pre-trial chamber of a judge, assisted by a master, or a magistrate, to monitor and review cases which have been committed for trial. This pre-trial chamber, Justice Wit has said, will give bail, sifting out the weaker cases, keeping the stronger ones, engaging in plea bargaining, thereby reducing the number that have to be tried. Justice Wit also floated the possibility of “judge-alone” trials.
Ramkarran referred an article `Abolish Jury Trials’ written by him in 2012 and since amended which said: “Trial by jury is supposed to provide the ultimate safeguard against authoritarianism and the abuse of state power. However, India, Pakistan, Singapore and others have abolished trial by jury. In the case of India, it was because of the divided nature of the society which resulted in jury decisions being made on the basis of prejudicial factors instead of the facts of the case. In the case of Singapore, it was as a result of the view that jury decisions on the basis of the prejudices of jurors was not a good basis for judging facts of a case. In Germany and Italy, decisions in criminal trials are made by tribunals consisting of a few judges and some citizens sitting together and making decisions on the guilt or innocence of the accused and passing sentence. There has been no complaint of the quality of justice dispensed in countries without jury trials”.
Ramkarran, who chaired the last major reforms to the constitution, said on Sunday that Guyana needs a criminal justice system that protects the constitutional rights of the accused by delivering a fair trial within a reasonable time and delivering justice for the victim.
He also fired another salvo at the authorities.
“Many ideas, including the abolition of jury trials, combined with the mechanisms offered by Justice Wit and others, can aid this process and substantially reduce the backlog. But seminars on these matters and articles such as this are currently a total waste of time. The authorities do not care, are not listening and have no intention of doing so”, he lamented.
