THE LEGAL FIX!

Mar 08, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Most of the persons who died in the riots at the Georgetown Prisons were on murder charges. This means that effectively at least fourteen murder cases have to be been taken off the list for trials.
The persons who were awaiting trial for murders have not been found guilty by any court. In fact, if you look at recent murder trials where many of the persons charged are being set free, those who were awaiting trial but met their deaths had a good chance of being freed.
This adds to the tragedy of last week. The families of those murdered by those who were in remand and lost their lives last week, will never know whether the right person was charged. Nor will they know whether justice was served. Or will they know how the case would have turned out. They are left to guess as to what may have been.
The fact that a person is charged with an offence does not make that person guilty, and therefore those who lost their lives in the prison last week never had a chance to establish their innocence.
It is a fact in this country that trials take too long. Part of the problem is that the courts’ fault and part of the problem is the legal system which actually thrives when cases are delayed and multiple hearings have to take place.
There is huge backlog of cases in the system. You need more judges, you need paper committals, you need faster trials. When a man has to spend more than five years in prison awaiting trial that man is going to become very frustrated and this places additional pressures on the prison system.
The government has been addressing the problems of prisoners. They have done this even before the findings of the Commission of Inquiry are known. So why then in a similar vein cannot the government address the problems of the court and the large backlog of cases?
Previous efforts at removing the backlogs have not helped. Cases which have been abandoned were struck off the books. But the reason why many of them may have been abandoned is because of the lengthy delays involved in the court system.
The government should not repeat that process. It should make public the sums of monies that were paid to the various persons for the exercise of reducing the backlogs and then move on with appointing twenty new judges to clear the backlog.
Where will these judges come from? They should be recruited from around the Commonwealth and should be judges who have retired. It will cost a fortune but as we have seen it will now cost the State a fortune to fix the problems at the prisons and compensate the families of those killed.
Seventeen families now have to be compensated. Funeral expenses have to be met. Security measures have to be put in place. New phone lines have to be installed.
The prisoners may soon demand ice cream after every meal. The price tag is going to be heavy for the Sate because already some lawyers are licking their lips and preparing briefs to sue the State for loss of life.
So it makes sense to try to fix the problems in the judiciary. It makes sense to try to reduce the prison population. The jails are overflowing with small drug offenders who face mandatory sentencing. This is something that needs to be looked at.
All over the world, governments examine the composition of their prison population, determine the major causes of imprisonment and make adjustments to the law. It is costly to keep a prisoner and therefore, rather than having to spend all that money why not impose a penalty on certain offenders and have them give a certain percentage of their salaries- if they can get a job – each month. In this way they are literally paying for their crimes.

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THE LEGAL FIX!

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