Editorial | Yes to Victim Information and Notification System, but …

The Gleaner fully supports Justice Vinette Graham-Allen’s call for a technology-based information system to keep victims and witnesses updated about the status of their cases.

But, as the authorities work on implementing the new systems, we believe that better can be done even with the limitations of the current arrangements, if people are held accountable for failing to do their jobs. Which includes having the book thrown at them when they wilfully and perversely act outside the norm.

It’s called management. And adherence to the law.

Justice Graham-Allen is a member of Jamaica’s Supreme Court, a superior court of record with civil and criminal jurisdiction over a wide swathe of matters. Under the current Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, the island’s judiciary has accelerated efforts, and made significant gains, to clear the backlog of cases in the system.

For instance, in 2023, the latest period for which full-year statistics are available, the Supreme Court had a clearance rate of 75.6 per cent; that is, it cleared nearly 25 per cent fewer cases than reached its dockets. It was the second consecutive year that the court had achieved a clearance rate of over 70 per cent. But, even at that, and in the absence of dramatic gains, it will take several years for the Supreme Court to become backlog-free, reaching a state where all cases that come before it are disposed of within 24 months.

“All divisions of the Supreme Court need clearance rates ranging from 110.55 per cent to 135.5 per cent over the next 10 years, to achieve and maintain a backlog-free status using a 24-month time standard,” the court observed in its statistical report.

MYRIAD CAUSES

The causes for delays in the court system are myriad, but some of it has to do with failure of communication - like victims and witnesses not being informed about their next court date or other developments in their cases.

“…victims do not attend (court), or their witnesses, because they are not kept informed of the outcome of the case on each and every occasion that it comes before the court,” Justice Graham-Allen told a recent seminar at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies of The University of the West Indies, Mona. “... They do not know the developments, nobody tells them. When the police go to find them at the last known address or telephone number, no answer, because that is not being done.”

This, in part, is the context in which Justice Graham-Allen proposed the implementation of a Victim Information and Notification System (VINS), an arrangement increasingly used in court systems around the world that allows people, especially victims, to be electronically advised about, or themselves track, developments in their cases.

Some of these systems can be complex, full-suite arrangements, with the courts linked to various other arms of the justice system, or relatively straightforward, allowing information to be sent to recipients via email and-or encrypted text messages on mobile phones.

The arrangement is not entirely dissimilar to, say, the web portal Jamaica established during the pandemic to allow people abroad to privately report their COVID-19 status online, ahead of travelling to the island. Neither is it unlikely the myriad platforms to track, real time, their various transactions online.

Which, on its face, would suggest that such a system ought to be technically difficult, or overly expensive, to implement. Further, it would be in keeping with Chief Justice Sykes’ often-declared intention of expanding the use of technology in Jamaica’s courts to enhance efficiency.

NOT DOING THEIR JOBS

But, while technology will no doubt improve how the courts execute their business, part of the problem, which was implicit in Justice Graham-Allen’s remarks, is people not doing their jobs – such as forgetting to tell, or just not telling, someone about their next court date. Or being sensitive enough to inform an accused person that they been offered, and have accepted bail.

While such information may not now be loaded into a VINS, it is information that now has to be collected and collated for investigators and prosecutors to keep track of their cases. Until VINS is on stream, one other step would be to inform the affected individuals about the development. That is not an expensive job function.

It is true that, given the informal nature of much of Jamaica’s social situation, it is often difficult to track individuals who do not want to be found. Which is exacerbated by many people’s wariness of the courts and legal matters. In criminal cases, this tends to worsen the longer the case lags.

But there is, too, inefficiency and sometimes incompetence. Or probably worse.

Last November, Justice Betram Morrison in a sitting of the St James Circuit Court, lamented the police’s failure to deliver or find any of the prospective jurors for a session of the court during which three police officers were to be tried in the Mario Dean matter. He found the police’s excuse of not finding any of the jurors flimsy.

“I am indignant at the paltriness of these excuses, because there are other matters which I have tried since I have been here and jurors have been found. But, for this matter, oddly enough, none can be found,” complained Justice Morrison.

Accountability, dear Justice Morrison! Accountability!