KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – The head of Jamaica’s judiciary Chief Justice Bryan Sykes says the murder case of dancehall artiste Adidja “Vybz Kartel” Palmer’s murder case should be seen as the poster child for “how internal inefficiencies can affect justice” and stressed that time standards established for the courts are of prime importance in dispensing justice.
Addressing the sixth Judiciary Strategic Management Retreat, Sykes argued that “judicial officers have ultimately the greatest impact on the performance of courts”.
He pointed out that there is an increasing recognition that the efficiency of courts is not so much tied to the amount of resources in the system as it is to the performance and the behaviour of judicial officers.
Based on this, the chief justice urged participants to utilise the strategic planning session to “think more deeply about these things and how we are going to improve our efficiency, not for the sake of numbers, but also for service delivery, so that persons can predict with reasonable accuracy how long the matters will take and consequently how much money they will have to expend”.
In highlighting the Palmer case as his “now best example of how internal inefficiencies can affect justice,” Sykes said,
“So here we have a case in which no court has said that the evidence could not sustain the conviction. No court has said that. But the case went down because of internal inefficiency, that’s what happened, you know”.
“So what we have is a gentleman, the deceased — I don’t know how many of you have read the case, but he was literally beaten to death by his attackers, and the family did what they were supposed to do. The police did what they were supposed to do. The forensic services did what they were supposed to do. Matter came to court. Judicial error occurred. But had our internal processes been what they ought to be, in all probability, there would have been a retrial,” the chief justice said.
“So what we have is that Mr Palmer and his co-defendants are happy as they ought to be, because it took a very long time. But what about the family of the deceased? They can’t say that the justice system worked for them. And it can’t be that a litigant, a witness, the police, the forensic services, they do the prosecution, they do their jobs and because of our internal inefficiency a man who should really be sitting down behind bars is now free as a bird entertaining countless millions of persons and the family of the deceased don’t even have the satisfaction of saying, well, at least someone was convicted for the murder of their son, their father, their uncle, or whatever other role he may have had in that particular family structure. And that is why time standards matter,” Sykes said.
“So the Adidja Palmer case is an extreme case, but it has actually happened,” the chief justice added.
He said the case is, in itself, an essential example to trial courts.
“For those of us in the trial courts, one of the important lessons, if you look at the decisions coming out of the Court of Appeal — particularly on the criminal side — you see increasingly the complaint, and which the Court of Appeal is responding to that because of the delay [saying] ‘these distressing things are happening to me’. And so the Court of Appeal has responded now by reducing the sentence, and so on. But again, and that’s fine, I have no problem with that, but you have to think now about those who turned up and gave evidence sometimes at serious risk to life and limb,” the chief justice said.
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