Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister, Gaston Browne.
Gov’t of Antigua and Barbuda
Antigua’s authorities says it’s leaning strongly in the direction of the absence of jurors in lots of trial circumstances together with felonies, arguing that it’s fairer when a single decide is in cost.
Authorities spokesman Lionel Hurst mentioned not too long ago that experiments of trials with out juries have been profitable and the cupboard of Prime Minister Gaston Browne has already been offered on the concept of judges being solely accountable for prison and different trials. They’re shifting to make this technique everlasting.
Authorities had run trials with judges in cost again in 2021 in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way of clearing a backlog. It labored, Hurst says. Again in 2021 as nicely, the prison proceedings act was in actual fact amended to permit for judge-only trials for offenses resembling larceny, forgery, misuse of medicine, cyber and digital crimes amongst others. For the capital offense of homicide, an accused can go for a decide alone. The primary such was held within the Jap Caribbean island final yr.
“The fairest methodology by which a judge-alone trial might be decided is that if the appeals court docket determines that the decide didn’t rule pretty. When you have got a jury trial, the collection of the jurors, the sitting of the jury, and so forth consumes way more time than when it’s judged alone. This effectivity, coupled with the institution of a public defender’s workplace, goals to make sure that justice shouldn’t be solely swift but in addition accessible to all, no matter monetary standing,” he mentioned, noting that this new system “brings some sanity to the decision-making.”
Because the system strikes in the direction of the two-tier one, officers in Trinidad had thought-about implementing an identical system in a bid to observe Belize, which is the primary of the CARICOM member nations to have performed so nearly a decade in the past with then Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin presiding over a homicide trial. The regulation affiliation and different teams had opposed the transfer by the administration to maneuver on this course.
Calls by some senior attorneys in Guyana to observe go well with have fallen largely on deaf ears with not a single effort being made to even contemplate this. Others which have moved to amend or modernize the system embody Jamaica, which permits for a two-tier system for some costs together with treason and homicide.
