Supreme Court judge Carlisle Greaves is suggesting that the court system is to be partially blamed for the increased levels of crime gripping the country.
Addressing a Rotary Club of Barbados South dinner meeting at the Accra Beach Hotel on Wednesday evening, Greaves said the judicial system was simply not moving fast enough in prosecuting cases, adding that “a man that is locked up is very unlikely to commit further crime”.
“Today is a funny night . . . I said that because today, with all the crime that is going on and the gun [related] killings and so on, everybody is probably asking the same question, why is this happening and what are we going to do about it?” Greaves said as he opened his presentation on the topic Aspects of Judicial Management – the Barbados to Bermuda Experience, Speeding up the Process.
“I think this is well known throughout Barbados that we have an inefficient judiciary. This is debated almost daily. The highest courts for our land [Caribbean Court of Justice] have criticized us repeatedly. I am not saying this as a criticism of our judiciary but as a realization that, for whatever reason it is inefficient . . . . A second area that we must acknowledge and everybody probably knows is that we have a problem with crime in particular. We have a problem with civil matters as well,” he said.
“That is so today and it was so in the 1990s when I presided as a magistrate. I was a prosecutor before that, and during my years as a prosecutor I came to the view that the reason we had an escalation of crime, according to police reports from the period 1989 on, was because there was sloth in the system. So the old adage that delay contributes to the increase of crime in society is a truth,” he theorized.
With Barbados recording 25 murders so far for the year, surpassing the 22 murders for all of last year, Greaves said “it looks like we are going to set a record this year”, adding that there was a similar “scourge” in the 1990s.
“But we were able to break the back of that. We also saw, like today, the emergence of gangs in the early 1990s, at first it was denied by those in authority but eventually we had to accept it as we came to know the gangs by name . . . but we were able to break the back of that,” said Greaves.
“Today as I said, the gunmen seem to be running havoc in our country. It is not only so in Barbados, but it is so in perhaps every Caribbean country. There are some that are worse,” he said, pointing to over 30 murders in St Lucia so far, more than 90 in the Bahamas and over 1,000 in Jamaica.
The retired prosecutor made reference to the granting of bail to people accused of murder, charging that there have been examples in recent times of “people who are on bail for murder get charge again for murder again.
“So you went from having one murder case to try to now two or more.”
Greaves, who has been practising in Bermuda for the past 19 years, recalled that when he became a prosecutor here in 1993 the backlog averaged under 50 cases per day, with some dating back seven years.
He said a number of measures were taken then to clear the backlogs, including prioritizing some cases and dismissing those that were considered trivial.
“We know that that backlog was completely eradicated, to the extent that we were guaranteeing trials within two weeks of the day they first came into court by the time I left in 1998,” Greaves said, adding that it was also necessary to make the changes that would fit the situation instead of trying to produce a blanket solutions.
Greaves said a part of the answer to the backlog was for magistrates to “take control of their own courts” and not be intimidated by police officers or lawyers.
He said the court should also set out its policies and make them known so as to create a level of certainty, limit the number of adjournments for cases before they are thrown out and make hearings thorough, but as short as possible to prevent lawyers from “pompersetting in court”.
He also explained that cases that were brought by the same police officer would be heard on the same day so as to save time.