Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
Today we continue a special six-part series, which started yesterday, on the state of justice in Jamaica. The series is written by one of the country's most experienced senior court journalists, Barbara Gayle. We welcome your feedback. Send it to:...
A major problem plaguing the Resident Magistrate's Courts and the judiciary these days, is staffing. Traditionally, resident magistrates have been recruited from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the Attorney-General's Department, with relatively few coming from the private bar.
These days, however, government lawyers, particularly from the office of the DPP, hardly stay there long enough to accumulate the minimum five years' experience necessary to qualify them as RMs. So it's a rarity now to have staffers with the length of service, skill and experience of former staffers who rose to the top echelons of the department and many of whom later became Supreme Court judges and Queen's Counsels.
As soon as these young staffers wet their feet, they are off to practise on their own or to join firms or to work with high-paying government agencies, the private sector, or they go overseas.
In order to fill these vacancies, inexperienced clerks of the court are recruited from the RM courts, and it is these fledglings who as prosecutors, end up being pitted against highly-experienced and skilled advocates, including Queen's Counsel. Lawyers from private practice are reluctant to serve as RMs as their experience at the private bar is not taken into account. So a lawyer with 15 years' service at the private bar, on applying to become a resident magistrate, starts at the same salary level as a lawyer from the office of the DPP or from the Attorney- General's Department, with the qualifying minimum of five years' experience.
Reports from the office of the DPP are that steps have been taken to recruit prosecutors. However, most of them have to be trained as such by being assigned for some time to the few senior prosecutors in the department.
Some prosecutors who joined the exodus from the office of the DPP have told The Gleaner of grouses they had with the department. Some who left after being there for three to five years or less, describe the job as stressful. They say the salary did not compensate for the volume of work they had to do.
Stress and humiliation
Some listed 'stress and humiliation' as their reasons for leaving. One explained that the usual circuit session in a rural parish lasted for three weeks. Prosecutors appearing at the circuit are booked into hotels but only from Sunday night to Friday afternoon each week. "So each Friday evening we have to leave the hotel and journey back home to the Corporate Area and then make the return trip on the Sunday evening. That did not make sense," he said.
If prosecutors were allowed to stay on at weekends at the hotels, then valuable time could be spent preparing cases over the weekend rather than have them travel back and forth with hardly any time in between to prepare the cases. Some prosecutors found the situation "very insulting." Complaints to the Ministry of Justice about the situation fell on deaf ears, he said.
The office of the DPP is not computerised and prosecutors often have to be scurrying around for precedents in certain cases. "It is very difficult when you are out on circuit and a problem comes up and there is need to check a precedent for a particular case," a former prosecutor told The Gleaner.
"In such a situation you should be able to call the office in Kingston and get the librarian or another prosecutor to fax them, but that is hopeless. Instead, prosecutors have to be calling around to ask other prosecutors if they know of the relevant precedents," he disclosed.
"I think the public is being short-served and justice is not being done if prosecutors do not have the necessary tools to prepare their cases," he added.
The source suggested that the Government review the office of the DPP immediately, take all steps to attract senior lawyers to the department and make it worthwhile for those who are there now getting training and experience, to stay.
The four senior prosecutors at the department are overburdened with work as they have to be prosecuting all the complex cases in the resident magistrates' courts, the Circuit Courts and in addition, appear in the Court of Appeal. At times, senior prosecutors are given case files mere days before a trial is to start and it is then that they have to begin tying up loose ends, for example, getting additional evidence that the police, in their investigations, had failed to get.
