EDITORIAL: PIs should go ... quickly

THE PROPOSAL for the abolition of preliminary inquiries (PIs) by magistrates into certain charges has been on Jamaica's agenda for decades.

But for all the glaring inadequacies of the system and its contribution to the delay, and ultimately the denial, of justice, nothing has happened. The lawyers' lobby has prevailed.

It is against this backdrop that this newspaper welcomes this week's disclosure by Prime Minister Bruce Golding, apparently endorsing our call for the matter to be dealt with, that his administration will soon table legislation to deal, finally, with what, essentially, is an inefficient piece of legal obsolescence.

"We hope to bring a matter to the House to deal with that very shortly," Mr Golding told the legislature last Friday. We suspect that this will entail amendments to the Criminal Justice Administration Act, the Indictments Act and the Resident Magistrates Act.

But Mr Golding should be aware that it won't be plain or easy sailing. He must anticipate howls of protest from the legal vested interests within his own Jamaica Labour Party, as well as the Opposition People's National Party and over-zealous civil libertarians, who will claim that people's right to fair hearings and the fullness of natural justice will be undermined.

In so far that this maybe true, the burden rests not only with accused persons, but weighs disproportionately on the victims of crime and prosecution witnesses. They suffer through lengthy, meandering legal proceedings and are often subject to intimidation and violence - even murder.

But bared of the high-minded clichés, the elimination of PIs, as the British discovered three decades ago, will cost little in terms of justice, particularly in Jamaica's overburdened court system where a preliminary hearing may last for up to 18 months before a determination of whether the matter should go to trial at the Supreme Court.

The fact is, preliminary hearings have largely evolved into full-blown trials where prosecution and defence posture and engage in legal manoeuvres and tactics of a kind for which the system was not intended. PIs, to put it another way, are not merely to discover whether there is prima facie evidence for a charge of murder or rape to go forward. These are almost full productions which will be repeated, assuming that the magistrate rules that there is a case to answer. By the way, they are, too, expensive exercises for accused persons who pay at the PI and for representation at the high court if they go to trial.

Adversarial engagement

One alternative to preliminary inquiries could be having a judge of the supreme court - it could be a specific assignment for several judges - review the evidence prosecutors intend to adduce to determine, in the absence of a full-blown adversarial engagement, whether a case had sufficient merit to proceed. The review judge could make rulings on discoveries.

We suggest to Prime Minister Golding that before he brings the proposed legislation to Parliament it should be subject to discussions between the political parties and other stakeholders in an effort to build consensus on a matter that deserves support. He might find it useful to produce white and green papers on the issue, inclusive of draft bills, so that the wider public, too, can have a say.

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