Johnathan Bruce, now 24 years old, was just a boy of 15 when he be­gan his nine-year stint on re­mand as his tri­al for the mur­der of a school­mate made its way through this coun­try’s painful­ly slow ju­di­cial sys­tem.

Bruce, at the time a Form Five stu­dent at Wa­ter­loo Sec­ondary, was prepar­ing to write his CSEC ex­ams, when he was ar­rest­ed and charged for the stab­bing death of Re­nal­do Dixon, 14, a Form Three stu­dent at the same school.

Ear­li­er this week, Mr Bruce was ac­quit­ted of Dixon’s mur­der fol­low­ing a judge-alone tri­al presided over by Jus­tice Ge­of­frey Hen­der­son.

But even as Mr Bruce gets his first taste of free­dom, re­turn­ing to a world that has changed a lot over the years he spent in prison, the ver­dict in his case has evoked painful mem­o­ries for the vic­tim’s moth­er, Camille Taitt. She be­lieves the ju­di­cial sys­tem has failed her.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, jus­tice de­layed is the rule rather than the ex­cep­tion in this coun­try, and the fam­i­lies of Dixon and Bruce are not the on­ly ones who have been af­fect­ed by this ma­jor de­fi­cien­cy in T&T’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.

Like Camille Taitt, Pauline Lum Fai feels she was failed by the sys­tem, al­though the out­come for the two young men charged with the mur­der of her six-year-old son, Sean Luke, was dif­fer­ent. Last Sep­tem­ber, Akeel Mitchell and Richard Cha­too were con­vict­ed of that mur­der, which had been com­mit­ted more than 15 years ear­li­er. Cha­too was 16 at the time, and Mitchell was just 13.

The com­mon thread here was the in­or­di­nate length of time be­tween the lay­ing of charges and the de­liv­ery of a ver­dict.

These are just two cas­es of the many af­fect­ed by the in­fe­ri­or qual­i­ty of jus­tice de­liv­ery in T&T.

There has been a great deal of talk about the need to bring about mean­ing­ful change at all lev­els of the sys­tem. In re­cent years, some in­cre­men­tal leg­isla­tive and op­er­a­tional changes have been in­tro­duced that should have re­sult­ed in the speed­ing up of tri­als. How­ev­er, too many peo­ple are still at the mer­cy of an in­ef­fi­cient crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.

All the ma­jor play­ers—the po­lice, the Of­fice of the DPP, the ju­di­cia­ry and the prison sys­tem—are equal­ly to blame for this un­sat­is­fac­to­ry sit­u­a­tion.

A ma­jor area of con­cern is the ex­tra­or­di­nary length of time spent on re­mand in over­crowd­ed and un­san­i­tary con­di­tions. In too many cas­es, by the time the mat­ter is con­clud­ed, the ac­cused has al­ready been in prison for a pe­ri­od longer than the sen­tence on con­vic­tion.

When a mat­ter takes a long time to go to tri­al, the de­liv­ery of jus­tice can fur­ther be ham­pered by prob­lems such as ev­i­dence that goes miss­ing and the fad­ed rec­ol­lec­tion of wit­ness­es.

Many lives are neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by this sit­u­a­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ac­cused, the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies, with rip­ple ef­fects felt across so­ci­ety.

In this re­cent case, af­ter nine years of wait­ing, the Bruce and Dixon fam­i­lies can on­ly now get on with the chal­leng­ing task of pick­ing up the pieces of their lives and try­ing to move for­ward. That is not what jus­tice should look like.