KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

One puisne judge is mak­ing a com­mit­ment to rid the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem of a back­log of cas­es.

Puisne judge Trevor Jones was one of five to be ap­point­ed at the Pres­i­dent’s House yes­ter­day.

Im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter re­ceiv­ing his in­stru­ment of ap­point­ment, Jus­tice Jones said he was laser-fo­cused on get­ting the back­log of crim­i­nal mat­ters down.

Jus­tice Jones said there are two main fac­tors that would as­sist in man­ag­ing the length of time it takes for cas­es to be tried.

“I know the bur­den that we have. When I first was ap­point­ed to act, it was to deal with the back­log of cas­es. So that we know we have a back­log of crim­i­nal cas­es, and we are very laser-fo­cused to get that back­log down and to main­tain trust and con­fi­dence in the ju­di­cia­ry. I think that’s what we’re all fo­cused on. So, one of the ben­e­fits I would say as a mas­ter is fo­cus­ing more on case man­age­ment. So in the past, tri­als took too long, and now that we have the crim­i­nal pro­ce­dure rules, we try our best to use that to min­imise the time it takes to con­duct tri­als.

“Al­so, with the in­tro­duc­tion of judge-alone tri­als, that has as­sist­ed in the re­duc­tion of the time it takes. So those two meth­ods, prop­er case man­age­ment, use of judge-alone tri­als when and where it’s ap­pro­pri­ate, I think that as­sists in man­ag­ing the length of time a tri­al takes and the length of time it takes to have tri­als. And I think that’s one of the ob­jec­tives of the Chief Jus­tice in ex­pand­ing the bench, is to min­imise the amount of time it takes for tri­als to come be­fore ju­di­cial of­fi­cers.”

Chief Jus­tice Ron­nie Boodoos­ingh al­so en­cour­aged the new puisne judges to en­sure that they meet the de­mands of the pub­lic in­ter­est­ed in re­ceiv­ing judg­ments in a time­ly man­ner, so they could main­tain trust and con­fi­dence in the ju­di­cial sys­tem.

CJ Boodoos­ingh said, “You joined the Ju­di­cia­ry at an im­por­tant time in our coun­try’s his­to­ry. We’ve had a re­cent tran­si­tion to a new Chief Jus­tice. The de­mands of the pub­lic are right­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Mem­bers of the pub­lic are in­ter­est­ed in en­sur­ing that they re­ceive their judg­ments in a time­ly man­ner, that they ob­tain a fair hear­ing, and that when they bring dis­putes to the court, that these are re­solved in a fair, just, and ef­fi­cient way. And so there­fore, the pub­lic would scru­ti­nise our con­duct and our ac­tions as a Ju­di­cia­ry and as in­di­vid­u­als, and it is im­por­tant that we all try our best to en­sure that we main­tain trust and con­fi­dence in the Ju­di­cia­ry and in the ju­di­cial sys­tem.”

The oth­er judges ap­point­ed yes­ter­day were Jus­tice Ray­mond Roberts, as well as Madam Jus­tices Maria Bus­by Ear­le-Cad­dle, Jose­fi­na Bap­tiste Mo­hammed, and Sydelle John­son.

Some of the cas­es that puisne judges over­see are mur­ders, manslaugh­ter, and rape.