MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Leonie Morris believes her experiences over the last eight years provide living proof that the Jamaican justice system doesn’t work for poor people.

Eight years after a car accident seriously damaged her lower back, Morris is still to get court-ordered compensation which would allow her to do corrective surgery.

This comes after an appeal against a Supreme Court ruling in her favour dating back to mid-2012, which is still to be heard by the Court of Appeal.

Further, there is no indication of when the matter will be heard since the notes of evidence detailing what transpired in the Supreme Court hearing are yet to be prepared, signed off, and sent to the Court of Appeal.

The initial ruling by Justice Courtney Daye on June 11, 2012 was for Morris to be awarded approximately $5.5 million in damages. However, from that figure, $2 million paid over to Morris by motor vehicle insurers Advantage General Insurance Company Limited was to have been subtracted, effectively leaving approximately $3.5 million.

Morris told the Jamaica Observer that the $2 million from the insurance company was used to cover immediate expenses and debts including legal fees.

She said she expected at the time that the $3.5 million from the court-ordered award would have allowed her to do the operation on her back. In 2012 the surgery was projected to cost $1 million. It is likely to cost much more now.

In response to questions from the Sunday Observer, Morris conceded that had she known then what she now knows, she would have done the medical procedure with part of the $2 million received from the insurers, while asking creditors to wait.

As the situation now stands, Morris says she is in constant pain due to a separated disc in her lower back. Her movement is hampered to such an extent that she can’t bend; she walks with a pronounced limp, is unable to work, and is heavily dependent on relatives.

“I am an independent person and when I see I can’t work to support myself, l find it very, very hard,” the 52 year-old mother of four and grandmother, told the Sunday Observer.

Morris’s trauma started on a rainy day in June 2009. A native of Clarendon, Morris was working as a domestic helper in Mandeville. It was while she was on a shopping trip with a relative of her employer that the car in which she was a passenger was hit from behind by another vehicle.

Morris suffered severe back pains and lost mobility after the accident. Medical examinations revealed damage requiring surgery.

Through her lawyer, Mandeville-based Latoya Renae Stephenson, Morris filed suit. The civil court action moved with relative speed to judgement by Justice Daye. Bailiffs then moved to execute the court order by seizing two vehicles belonging to the defendant, Glenville Pitter, with an intention to sell.

Little did Morris know of the problems ahead. Pitter’s lawyers Oswest Senior-Smith & Company immediately applied for a stay of execution of the court judgement which blocked the sale of the vehicles. They also appealed against Justice Daye’s ruling for general damages of $3.5 million. The appellant submitted that the award for general damages should be $2.7 million or $800,000 lower.

In the five years since then, costs of storage for the two motor vehicles have long outstripped the court order for damages. Efforts by Stephenson to have the case brought to the Appeal Court — including sending a formal note to the Registrar of the Supreme Court on March 10, 2014 and a letter to the Chief Justice on January 4, 2017 —have borne no fruit.

Repeated recent efforts by the Sunday Observer to make telephone contact and to get a comment from the Registrar of the Supreme Court failed.

Also, persistent efforts last week by the Sunday Observer to contact Pitter’s lawyer Denise Senior Smith, for a comment failed.

In her letter to the Chief Justice in January, Stephenson pointed out that, “I have been in contact with the Court of Appeal and I am advised that a letter was sent to the Registrar of the Supreme Court on August 25, 2016 requesting an update on the status of the record and to date the record is still incomplete.”

The letter to the chief justice also noted, “The bailiff for the parish of Manchester seized goods from the defendant in July 2012 and said goods are in storage as a stay of further execution was granted. The daily storage fees accrued since July 2012 now outweigh the value of the goods.”

One legal source told the Sunday Observer that the appallingly long delay in the Leonie Morris vs Glenville Pitter case is by no means unusual, but simply underlines the inefficiencies in Jamaica’s court system, both civil and criminal, caused by staff shortages and inadequate resources.

“They (authorities) have appointed new judges, but they haven’t appointed new clerks. The system is top heavy, there is nobody to help with the administrative side of things… You need more people on the ground so the system can run smoothly,” the source said.

“So the same clerks that are at Supreme Court, they pull them out and send them to court during the day; that makes no sense, the desk is bound to overflow,” the source added.

Yet, with all that, some cases are completed relatively quickly. “Some people have better luck than others,” the Sunday Observer source explained.

In the meantime, Morris is in limbo, bearing her pain as best she can. For her the situation provides one simple lesson. “There is no justice for poor people in Jamaica,” she said.