Ronald Thwaites | Diminishing justice

Last week, the minister of justice and the chief justice variously acknowledged that the Jamaican court system, particularly the Supreme Court, cannot dispose of all the cases before it within any reasonable time frame. The almost 1,000 cases now pending before the Home Circuit Court prove their point.

I am frightened.

The rule of law, as adjudicated by an impartial court, is the hub of every democracy. To admit that this is beyond our capacity now should leave every Jamaican scared for their lives and liberties.

If you can’t be sure of your prompt “day in court” for a fair hearing, whether in domestic, civil or criminal matters, you are vulnerable in the extreme to extrajudicial peril.

James Madison, one of the authors of the American Constitution, understood that there is no Bill of Rights powerful enough to assure freedom for a people unless those bound by it share a base of common virtue, agreed moral standards.

Allowing the drawl of the justice system to become chronic is evidence that this is the point we’ve reached.

The same is becoming, or is already, true about many of our crucial public institutions. Consider the state of education, healthcare, corrections and public infrastructure.

I contend that money is not our biggest obstacle to systemic improvement. It is the decline of public commitment and national spirit, the things Madison was talking about, which cause us to become complacent about their decline.

LIKE SINGAPORE, ANDREW?

Jamaica will never become like Singapore if we remain this fractured society, riven with brazen corruption; with leaders unable to unite us around any common cause and for whom repression and distraction, rather than social engineering, are their sleazy and futile resort for all ills.

Of course, mediation and dispute-resolution alternatives are to be promoted. Not yet culturally appreciated and themselves thick and dilatory to access, they are no substitute for an efficient and trusted court system.

If the two highest protectors of justice affirm that the system cannot bear the weight of resolving our most serious complaints, what have we got left?

Elements in the security forces and community enforcers have answered that question long ago. Check what’s happening right now.

The backlog is being reduced extrajudicially every day. If you normalise the killing of all suspected criminals, the courts will not have to try them.

If the street-corner judge, in or out of uniform, is convinced that the death sentence is appropriate (to hell with INDECOM’s well-intentioned ponderousness), there is likely to be commendation instead of accountability.

That’s what the decrepit inadequacy of the court system causes.

CROOKED THINKING

Forget about plea bargaining to lighten the case load. Delroy, you have hoisted yourself on your own petard.

Justice Sykes is telling you what was always obvious. Mandatory sentences and plea bargains are contradictions which cannot be resolved.

That almost four out of five gun-crime cases end in acquittal or dismissal begs the question as to why, and by whom, they were brought in the first place. Who is looking into that?

Why are guns and ammunition so easily available if hundreds of the suicidal ‘violence producers’ have been “unalived”? What happens anyway to the masses of ballistics seized from their corpses? Any recycling?

Our screwed-up ethic is that bloodletting is an essential ingredient of justice and safety.

MAKING THINGS WORSE

A guy with whose case I was associated languished in custody (at a probable public expense of over $7 million) for five years before trial.

His health, personal life and economic prospects were destroyed before his guilt was tested. At least he is alive.

A high proportion of prison inmates could be released under proper conditions at no risk to the public. Others can be put to work to make reparation for their wrongs and pay for their keep.

Then we would not need such an elaborate new Alcatraz, which some contractor (we already know who wants to) will oblige us to keep full.

Why can’t whatever has worked to “eliminate” the backlog in the parish courts be applied to the High Court?

CIVIL JUSTICE

In the area of civil practice, there are several instances where parties are constrained to compromise matters in which there are important legal issues that should be adjudicated, just to avoid several years of delay.

That is not justice either.

In the field of probate and administration, it is better to dispose of whatever you have before death, to avoid the suffering of post-mortem cost and time-wasting.

Avoid your family falling into the clutches of the Administrator General by any means possible.

It is not beyond the public and private resources of this nation to enable a prompt and fair justice system.

Material underinvestment and spiritual disrespect for the divinity in every single Jamaican life are what have led us to normalise inadequacy.

As a teenager, I sometimes attended gaol delivery with my uncle, a fearless justice of the peace who believed in the liberty of the subject as the first principle of law and so saw it as his duty to inquire regularly into the circumstances of custody of each inmate at Denham Town.

Does that spirit, that activity, exist today?

DEFEAT

Divesting the Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC) facility on Spanish Town Road is the funeral announcement for the emaciated body of food sufficiency in Jamaica.

Rising food prices, killing us now, have worse to come, given drought and international conditions.

The AMC was to be the hub that would have taken up the 40 per cent post-harvest loss that makes agriculture unprofitable, processed some, provided fair prices to consumers, and wasted nothing, especially in times of scarcity.

The need for private-sector skills in the AMC’s complex management was accepted. The principle behind its establishment now seems to be dismantled. And so are our hopes of much greater local food sufficiency. Self-defeat once again.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the reitied principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.