KINGSTOWN, (CMC):
St Vincent and the Grenadines is hoping to join at least one other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country in abolishing preliminary inquiries as regional countries move to deal with a backlog of cases as well as the crime situation.
Trinidad and Tobago announced that from December 12 this year, the Administration of Justice (Indictable Proceedings) Act, 2011 (AJIPA) and its six amending acts had been proclaimed and that “this has been preceded by decades of discussions, stakeholder engagements, policy developments, legislative amendments and more recently sensitisation sessions in collaboration with the Judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago.
“The proclamation of the AJIPA which abolishes preliminary enquiries will create sweeping changes to the functioning of the Courts and the dispensation of justice, reduce case backlog, ease the burden on witnesses and significantly eliminate the wastage of time and resources in the disposal of indictable matters.
“The citizens of Trinidad and Tobago can now anticipate a thoroughly reformed, highly streamlined, and entirely operational pre-trial system that has been under development for several decades,” the Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Legal Affairs said.
Now, St Vincent and the Grenadines is exploring the possibility of following Port of Spain, with Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves saying his administration is proposing changes as to how the courts handle certain criminal matters and that it has a clear strategy on crime.
Gonsalves, who is also the minister of national security and legal affairs, said “we have done some important reforms already in relation to evidence, procedure. But we need to do some more”.
Gonsalves, a lawyer, who practised law in the criminal court for many years before becoming prime minister in March 2001, said also “we have done something in relation to preliminary inquiries.
“But defence counsel will still insist on the preliminary inquiry rather than having what you may call a paper committal with the statements being made and the defence would say well, okay, we’ll go straight to trial.”
A preliminary inquiry is a legal process through which a magistrate determines if the prosecution has enough evidence for a jury to consider in determining whether someone is guilty or not guilty of a charge.
Preliminary inquiries (PI) are conducted in two forms, a paper committal, in which the magistrate, prosecutor and lawyer for the defendant read through the evidence in the presence of the defendant, or witnesses come to court and give evidence and are cross examined.
Gonsalves said that a lot of the time lawyers reject paper committals not because of the merits of the case, saying “sometimes is a monetary thing.
“The lawyers want to make sure that, they don’t like me to say this but I know how the system works, to collect their piece of change for the PI, for the preliminary inquiry, and so on and so forth.
“And maybe we need to change that and take away the right from the defence and let the presiding magistrate, on the basis of the documents which are before (him or her])say, listen, ‘I’ve read these documents and I’m sending this forward,” Gonsalves said, adding that this would also alleviate a backlog in the system.
He acknowledged that the country would have to have more judges because cases would move through the system faster.
“But that’s fine,” he said, adding that a case is being made to abolish jury trials for murder and some other offences.