New chief justice to prioritise courts’ challenges

The boyhood dreams of being a lawyer reached their highest peak of reality on Friday as Leslie Haynes SC became the sixth chief justice of an independent Barbados and the 15th since 1841 when the position was created three years after Emancipation.

Haynes recalled that when he was about 13 years old, he wanted to be an attorney “and that’s all I knew”.

Now the new head of the judiciary faces a mountainous backlog of civil cases before the courts that have been the focus of persistent, often withering criticism from the seven justices of the Caribbean Court of Justice.

And Haynes told Barbados TODAY in a telephone interview shortly after being sworn in at State House that between now and his ascent to the bench when the new court term begins in September, his priority is to appraise the challenges faced by the judiciary and seek solutions.

“The first order of business is to try to understand where we are in the law courts,” the chief justice said. “The first order of business is to try to understand the problems and the issues, and then try to understand the solutions. I can’t really do anything unless I start from ground zero and find out where things are.”

This means he will ascertain from the judiciary, the registry, the magistracy and others in the court system what issues they are experiencing.

On the issue of delayed decisions by judges, the chief justice disclosed that he would assess the situation. 

“I have to look and understand how many decisions we have that are delayed, as distinct from those decisions that are not being given because the judges have retired without giving them. In other words, we will have to carry out an analysis of the data. Some time ago, a particular judge retired with 40-something outstanding decisions. Would you put that in a backlog or would you put that in something that has… that’s really not a backlog… that’s something we would have to find a way to solve.

“So, we have to find out what the data says before we can decide we are going forward. So, I am going to spend the next couple of months, between now and September, trying to understand all of the issues,” Haynes told Barbados TODAY.

The chief judicial officer argued that in order to properly tackle the challenge of delayed court decisions, standards have to be set. 

“If you look throughout the Commonwealth, they will tell you that a civil trial should be disposed of within two to three-and-a-half years, before you get to the six-month timeline for a judge to give a decision…,” he said. “If I lodged a case today, as a lawyer, what should I tell my client? If he said to me, ‘Leslie, how long will this take if we go all the way? How long will it take to get an answer or determination?’ My answer should be, the standards are two-and-a-half years.”

He added that the trial should start between 18 months and just over two years, and a decision given about six months after that.

“We have to set standards. We have to understand why certain cases are disposed of quicker than others, and why certain cases take a long time to be disposed of. It is a whole question of empirical evidence,” the chief justice said.

But while acknowledging the existence of a backlog, Haynes suggested caution in defining it.

At his swearing-in, he admitted that in the past couple of years, he had been working towards the new position. 

“I would say it was a little of a surprise. It was a very humbling experience. It is something, within the last couple of years, I have been working towards. So, it was expected and still a surprise at the same time,” said the former chairman of the National Insurance and Social Security Service and chairman of the Electoral and Boundaries Commission.

The senior counsel succeeds Sir Patterson Cheltenham to become the sixth person to hold the position since Sir William Randolph Douglas became chief justice in 1965, one year before Barbados’ independence. Sir Robert Bowcher Clarke, took office on December 13, 1841 as the first chief justice of Barbados. 

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb