Justice delayed is no longer justice
Published:Tuesday | August 25, 2020 | 12:09 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
In 2001, a group of missionaries arrived in Jamaica. They settled in St Mary and began working to provide housing solutions and educational and other opportunities for many residents of that parish. Among the missionaries were Randy and Sara Hentzel and Teri and Harold Nichols. It was not long before they decided that they would retire in this country.
In 2016 – 15 years after they started their life of service to St Mary – Randy and Harold went missing. It took the assistance of United States law enforcement to apprehend two St Mary men who, it turned out, had chopped and shot the missionaries before burying them. The men admitted to their crime, and witnesses were located. After four years, our police have informed these still grieving families that they would still have to wait another three years for a trial to start.
Jamaica’s justice machinery is heavily clogged and suffers from many years of backlog of cases. It would be unfair, however, to make our present chief justice the subject of public opprobrium. He has been a ‘slingless’ David, charging forward to a Goliath-like mountain of cases without the requisite army of officers needed to make any worthwhile assault on the problem. Then there is a coalescing matrix of factors both within and without the judiciary.
PAINFUL JUSTICE SYSTEM
In Jamaica, marriage is, for most of us, little more than a formal costume party when extra funds are available. The one-parent family is now firmly rooted in our culture. Without explaining the details, we find ourselves with unmanageable anger all around us and a certainty that the peaceful resolution of conflicts is impossible. It is such a society that finds itself with a justice system that takes 11 years and 87 court appearances before a verdict can be delivered on a case in St Thomas. If a witness went into the protection programme suggested by our system, he could enter with children in school and emerge a grandfather.
Former United States Chief Justice Warren Burger, addressing the American Bar Association in 1970, had this to say: “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people, and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: That people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe that the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfil its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Permit me to point your readers to the Mishnah section of the biblical writings of the Piokei Avots 5:8. If this is not available to some, it says, “Our Rabbis told us ... the sword cometh into the world, because of justice delayed and justice denied ... .” may I point out that this was written in the 1st Century BCE. And we still seem to be unable to understand the causes of violent crime around us in 2020 and the significant contribution the current state of affairs makes to it.
It seems that justice delayed is no longer justice.
GLEN TUCKER