EDITORIAL - Justice and the photocopier

The official and widely used statistic is of a backlog of more than 400,000 cases in Jamaica's courts, a large portion of them being in the Supreme Court.

Over the last three weeks, this number has been added to, which, of itself, is not outside the norm. Except in this case, the major cause is not primarily the usual butt of the public's complaints: irresponsible lawyers who confirm appearances for the same day, at the same time in different courts; or tardy judges who fail to hold errant attorneys to account, or are themselves arbitrary in their adjournments, or, as some people claim, less than robust in their work ethics.

This time, the problem is something far more mundane: a photocopying machine. Or, one, as this newspaper reported yesterday, that has been in disrepair for a month.

"The machine just needs to be serviced because it is a new machine that was bought in April," a court employee complained.

If, or when, this will happen, is not clear for, insofar as we have been able to gather, there is no formal service contracts in place for photocopiers at the Supreme Court.

Document pile-up

The upshot from the broken-down photocopier, court staff complain, is a pile-up of documents that urgently need to be copied for cases, criminal and civil, to move along. In a word: backlog!

The stalling of the cases for want of a photocopier in the normal course of things would be deemed an appropriate metaphor for Jamaica's justice system. While there is hardly a question about the intellect and acumen of the judiciary, the system within which they operate is admitted to be creaky and inefficient. The vision of it is of bulk copying being done from stencils being run on hand-cranked Gestetner machines.

We, though, harboured notions of change. Mr Delroy Chuck, the justice minister, in his four months in office, has talked a lot about improvements. We do know, however, that it is a common error in Jamaica to mistake a word that represents an action for the action itself.

Repairs must be made

Our second and more important cause for hope was the formal launch last year of Court Management Services (CMS), an independent entity that assumed the administrative, as opposed to the judicial, management of the courts. This would accomplish two things: it helps to create the declared constitutional distance between the judicial and executive arms of government; and it gives the court system greater and more immediate access to resources that are critical to its functioning. The court system, for instance, has a greater say in determining its budget and, for instance, is in a better position to determine what is to be spent on servicing photocopiers.

We will, of course, be told the system is still in transition, some functions are still being managed by Mr Chuck's ministry, and that this is teething pain. Not good enough! That photocopier has to be repaired.

Money may not be the problem in this case, but it is part of the issue that has faced the justice system, in which event we repeat a suggestion we have posited before: use the Caribbean Court of Justice to finance the Jamaica courts. That is, provide the CMS with a one-off trust fund, the interest from which would be used to finance the courts.