Editorial | Fix parish court record system

Last week’s ruling by the Privy Council in the Ray Morgan case highlighted how laxity and bungling in Jamaica’s criminal judicial system led to another of the island’s far too frequent instances of miscarriage of justice.

But this matter underlines a basic problem in the parish courts – in this case, the storage and maintenance of records – that is not expensive to fix. Ideally, the paper-based records of all courts should be digitised.

For now, though, this newspaper would be satisfied if they were properly collated and placed in files that are easily retrievable. That needs only a trained librarian and an army of assistants. This can be done as a project.

Ray Morgan was convicted and sentenced in a magistrate’s (now parish) court in February 2011. He immediately gave a verbal notice of appeal against his 12-year jail sentence and subsequently did what was required to comply with the 21-day deadline for his grounds of appeal to be lodged with the clerk of the relevant magistrate’s court.

However, the prison authorities bungled. The document was sent instead to the registrar of the Court of Appeal.

Despite Mr Morgan’s many efforts over the years to determine the status of his appeal, it took nearly seven, in 2017, for him to discover that an administrative error had forwarded his appeal to the wrong court although the prison authorities were told of the error a year after it had happened. When he was informed of the cock-up, Mr Morgan was also advised that he was deemed to have abandoned his appeal.

He nonetheless persisted. He asked the Court of Appeal to use its available discretion to hear the case, allowing him, in effect, to file the appeal out of time.

RELEASED

In Jamaica, it is usual for prisoners to be released after serving three-quarters of their sentences. But when a prisoner appeals, his sentence, in theory, is stayed.

So if Mr Morgan had not appealed, he could reasonably have expected to be released in 2008. However, he was kept in jail. By the time the Court of Appeal, in June 2021, sat to determine whether to hear his case, Mr Morgan was out of jail. The dozen years of his sentence had passed.

In the event, the appeal judges declined to determine, as Mr Morgan contended, whether the magistrate overshot her powers in holding that his three four-year sentences run consecutively.

The Appeal Court conceded that Mr Morgan’s claim wasn’t without merit. It, however, held that even if he prevailed, the hearing would, essentially, be an “academic exercise” given that he had already served his sentence.

Further, the justices argued, hearing the matter would not be in the interest of the administration of justice given the time since the case was heard in the magistrate’s court and the difficulty in finding the records therefrom.

The Privy Council disagreed. Saying that a “serious miscarriage of justice has occurred”, the UK judges ruled that the Court of Appeal erred “in failing to take into account the wider public interest in the exercise of discretion” to hear the case.

They added: “[I]t would offend the basic principles of fairness that failures by the justice system, for which the appellant can bear no responsibility, should amount to a countervailing criterion in the exercise of discretion under the proviso to hear and determine an appeal.”

Whether parish court judges have the power to impose penalties like the one against Mr Morgan, is, of course, an important legal issue to resolve. An equally grave issue, though, is the cavalier fashion with which the justice system too often treats people who find themselves in conflict with the law.

LANGUISHING IN PRISON

There are the many instances of mentally ill people languishing in prison for decades, falling through the cracks because they were deemed unfit to plead – like the notorious case of Noel Chambers, 81, who, after 40 years in limbo, died in jail in 2020. He was a skeletal frame, full of bed sores.

There is, too, the backlog of cases in the Court of Appeal – 165 up to the middle of June – which can’t go forward because of the absence of court records, partly because of a shortage of stenographers.

Despite the Morgan ruling – which was surprising because of the recency of its delivery – the Jamaican courts have increasingly shifted towards imposing a tighter time frame on what is a “reasonable time” the citizens should wait to be tried for criminal offences. This month, 52 lottery scamming cases were thrown out at the Trelawny circuit court because of years-long delays by the constabulary’s Communication Forensic and Cyber Crime Division (CFCD) in providing reports on electronic devices used in the alleged crimes.

Last month, the very Court of Appeal, in the Orville Watson case, overturned Mr Watson’s 2016 conviction for illegal possession of firearm and wounding because of infringements of his constitutional right to a fair hearing before a superior court within a reasonable time. After seven years, a full transcript/record of his trial in the lower court remained unavailable for his appeal.

That shouldn’t happen in any court. It is, however, easier to fix in parish courts, where the requirement for trial records is far less onerous and complex than at the Supreme Court or Court of Appeal. Requirement: good librarians and decent library assistants.