If fish comes from the bottom of the sea and says that shark is below, why should we not believe it?

It is no secret that the people who work in the corridors of the justice system are, too many of them, lacking in faith and trust in the system. And that is the real crisis that we face.

The people who administer the justice system know something that we, most of us, don’t know. No wonder our legal luminaries remained mum when fugitive Harold Crooks, the former commandant of the Island Special Constabulary Force and copious writer on the justice system, said he would rather flee Jamaica than face trial here, because he had no confidence in the system.

Perhaps we cannot build a credible case on a fugitive who might find it a convenient excuse to blame the faults of a justice system for his refusal to face his alleged crime. But it gets worse.

Several attorneys, we are told in yesterday’s edition of the Observer, have taken issue with the Justice Ministry’s much-touted criminal case management programme, arguing that a requirement for them to disclose their defence ahead of trial could be disadvantageous to their clients.

Comments by senior counsel, Mr Patrick Atkinson — now to be elevated to that rarified company of Queen’s Counsels — are instructive.

“On the form that is provided during case management conference, there is a section that asks you to disclose your defence, but I’m not going to do that,” the learned Mr Atkinson is quoted as telling our newspaper. He insisted that there was no legislative basis for disclosing a defence.

Moreover, Mr Atkinson proffered that distrust of the police and prosecution was behind the unwillingness of lawyers to reveal their defence, pointing to the murder trial of former Matthews Lane strongman, Donald ‘Zeeks’ Phipps, in which a potential witness for the defence was allegedly arrested by the police and released without charge only after Phipps’ conviction.

Mr Atkinson is of the view that the police arrested the man to prevent him from giving evidence on behalf of Phipps.

Apart from the issue of disclosure, Mr Atkinson was of the view that the case management system would not work without the necessary resources to provide proper forensic facilities, employ more pathologists, judges, prosecutors and police and to create more courthouses.

If Mr Atkinson and like-minded lawyers are so wracked with doubts, what should be expected of ordinary Jamaicans?

We ourselves had welcomed the notion of a case management system for its good intentions. The initiative is aimed at identifying and resolving beforehand any issues of law that may arise in a trial, thus facilitating more speedy trials.

If it works, the dreadful clutter of cases — 19,456 active cases in the Resident Magistrate’s courts alone as at 2007 — should be a thing of the past. Everybody knows that justice delayed is justice denied, and that Jamaicans are wont to take the law into their own hands because of the intolerably long wait for justice through the courts.

But if there are flaws in the case management system, we would expect that every effort would be made to resolve them as speedily as possible. In that vein, we look forward to the pending suggestions from the Jamaican Bar Association on the matter of disclosure of defence.

We hope that Mr Atkinson will be part of the solution.