Justice Greaves says judges not always to blame for delays in court

Justice Carlisle Greaves has defended judges against criticism that they are the cause of holdups in the judicial system.

He explained to jurors that there were several factors that contribute to delays in the court system, as several cases on his court’s docket failed to materialise on Monday.

“To you all who are sitting in the gallery, you will hear out there in society all of the criticism of the courts – the judges, they don’t do any work. I think you might be getting to have an appreciation of how difficult it is to run courts. There are so many players and so many things, it takes a very strong judge to really get the court system to work,” he told those sitting in the No. 3 Supreme Court.

He said the situation caused several people to become frustrated, including judges.

“. . . . But they are all human beings. They are ordinary human beings [and] some may decide ‘look, I am not fighting anymore’. Some fight at the risk of being most unpopular,” said Justice Greaves who maintained that the courts were “extremely difficult to run”, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Not only in Barbados, in every place I know, they are tough . . . . It is not easy.”

The judge said that in his court, there were usually three cases set down for any given day, which he said was working before the pandemic interrupted the normal flow.

“COVID caught all of us and we are trying to catch back ourselves again . . . but it is going to take some time,” Justice Greaves said, adding that the courts were also “suspicious” of some COVID-19 test results that were presented just as a trial was to start.

Offering another contributor to delays, the judge added: “You have a jurisdiction where, despite admitting 50 lawyers to the bar every year – in the case of Jamaica about 300, in Trinidad about 150, in England about a couple thousand – only about two or three of those practice criminal law.”