JAMAICAN males, 20-36 years old, are the main persons facing the parish courts for criminal offences, according to information provided in the House of Representatives yesterday by Minister of Justice, Delroy Chuck.

In a statement to the House, which was informed by the Chief Justice’s Statistics Reports for the Parish Courts of Jamaica for the period January – June 2018, Chuck noted that 82 per cent of the matters before parish courts, (formerly Resident Magistrates’ Courts), during the period, involved males in this age group.

This included 26.99 per cent who were 20-26 years old, and 29.34 per cent, aged 27 to 36.

Chuck noted that, for the first time, annual reports were prepared for the Supreme Court and Parish Courts for 2017 and were being tabled in Parliament.

He said that the reports were posted on the website of the Supreme Court and are being tabled in the House in order to increase transparency in the operations, accountability and performance of the courts, on the approval of the Cabinet.

He said that the reports showed that there has been significant improvement in the case disposal rates of the courts since the start of 2018.

Giving what he described as some “raw data”, Chuck pointed out that an average of 2,451 new criminal cases are filed across all parishes on a monthly basis; a total of 14,824 new criminal cases entering the parish courts for the first six months of 2018.

Eleven courts achieved case clearance rates of more than 90 per cent and, therefore, attained international standards in this respect in the second quarter (The case clearance rate is the ratio of new cases filed to cases completed, regardless of when those cases commenced).

Minister Chuck pointed out, however, that a persistent case clearance rate of less than 100 per cent, however, would maintain the current backlog. The courts, therefore, has to target 90-100 per cent clearance rate in order to prevent the backlog from persisting.

Incidentally, there was no agreement between Chuck and his predecessor, former Justice Minister Mark Golding as to how large the backlog was, Golding scolded the media for claiming that it was in the region of 400,000 and suggested that it was closer to 29,000. But Chuck said that his information was that it had been reduced to 25,000.

The overall clearance rate for the second quarter of 2018 was 98 per cent, an improvement of nine percentage points over the first quarter. Although these results indicate that there are still more new cases filed than cases disposed of across the Parish Courts, the overall direction is quite positive for the reduction of the criminal case backlog, Chuck insisted.

He also noted that the Corporate Area Criminal Court (now Kingston and St Andrew Parish Court) and the Westmoreland Parish Court had the highest disposal rates of 62-63 per cent.

He said the chief justice has set a target of 130 per cent — 140 per cent for case clearance rates in order to clear and prevent a continued backlog.

“The noteworthy improvements in the case clearance and case disposal rates across all Parish Courts have resulted in the case congestion rate falling from 310.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2018 to 223.3 per cent in the second quarter, an improvement of 86.9 percentage points.

Case Congestion rate means the ratio of pending cases to cases disposed in a given period. It is an indication of how fatigued the courts are, given the existing state of resources and degree of efficiency.

A case congestion rate of 150 per cent, for example, is an indication that given the resources currently at a court’s disposal and its degree of efficiency, it is carrying 1.5 times its capacity.

Chuck said that the ideal case congestion rate should be around 100 per cent, which would indicate that the courts’ existing resources are efficiently aligned and optimally utilised. If the current trend continues for the next two years, the criminal case backlog across the Parish Courts will be reduced by at least 72.

“This means that if we manage to sustain the current disposal rate, we will not only clear the backlog, but we will also prevent the creation of new backlog,” the minister said.