Article published in The Economist...., entitled “Twelve Clueless Men: A drive to abolish jury trials”, was published on August 30 in the international magazine. “In Trinidad and Tobago, most educated professionals are exempt from jury service. The chief justice has concerns about the ‘functional literacy’ of the remaining pool,”... “He talks of a murder case where a jury foreman misunderstood the word ‘unanimous’ and reported a guilty verdict when he should not have done so; that mistake, when it came to light, could be unpicked only by a presidential pardon. Better, he says, for trained lay assessors to sit alongside judges,” the article stated. “We simply cannot carry on the way we are going,” Archie is quoted as saying. “Along with other reforms, he wants to abolish the jury system, a hallowed cornerstone of English common law for almost 800 years and exported to Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean. Juries, he argues, slow trials down, making them last up to a year, and clog his country’s courts. Clogged they certainly are. More than 500 jailed murder suspects await trial,” the article stated. “Their detractors in the Caribbean say that juries have other shortcomings. Unpaid lay jurors with no legal training struggle to understand judges’ rulings on points of law or their explanation of complex rules of evidence,” the article stated. Archie said it was hard to find “unbiased jurors”. “In small countries with a lively gossip network and active media, it is hard to find unbiased jurors, or to hide them from intimidation by violent gangsters. In a 1996 murder trial, where the nine defendants were eventually hanged, the defence challenged 205 potential jurors. With the jury pool exhausted, substitutes were pulled from a nearby beach,” the article stated. trinidadexpress/news/CJ-Archie-wants-jury-system-abolished-273499361.html
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:47:53 +0000