JUDGE ONLY TRIALS

Antigua’s government says it is leaning strongly towards the absence of jurors in many trial cases including felonies, arguing that it is fairer when a single judge is in charge.

Government spokesman Lionel Hurst said recently that experiments of trials without juries were successful and the cabinet of Prime Minister Gaston Browne has already been sold on the idea of judges being solely in charge of criminal and other trials. They are moving to make this system permanent.

Authorities had run trials with judges in charge back in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of clearing a backlog. It worked, Hurst says. Back in 2021 as well, the criminal proceedings act was in fact amended to allow for judge-only trials for offenses such as larceny, forgery, misuse of drugs, cyber and electronic crimes among others. For the capital offense of murder, an accused can opt for a judge alone. The first such was held in the Eastern Caribbean island last year.

“The fairest method by which a judge-alone trial can be determined is if the appeals court determines that the judge did not rule fairly. When you have a jury trial, the selection of the jurors, the sitting of the jury, and so on consumes far more time than when it is judged alone. This efficiency, coupled with the establishment of a public defender’s office, aims to ensure that justice is not only swift but also accessible to all, regardless of financial status,” he said, noting that this new system “brings some sanity to the decision-making.”

As the system moves towards the two-tier one, officials in Trinidad had considered implementing a similar system in a bid to follow Belize, which is the first of the CARICOM member nations to have done so almost a decade ago with then Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin presiding over a murder trial. The law association and other groups had opposed the move by the administration to move in this direction.

Calls by some senior lawyers in Guyana to follow suit have fallen largely on deaf ears with not a single effort being made to even consider this. Others that have moved to amend or modernize the system include Jamaica, which allows for a two-tier system for some charges including treason and murder.