CHIEF Parish Court Judge Chester Crooks says, while the new electronic ticketing system will assist in reducing the paperwork at the courts, for its full potential to be realised there will need to be the appropriate amendment to the relevant legislation.

According to Judge Crooks, these amendments are needed in order for the courts to work in a fully digital space.

Speaking at the third hosting of ‘A Conversation with the Judiciary’ at Spanish Court Hotel in Kingston on Friday, Crooks said “whilst mostly positive, the new system as regards traffic matters has highlighted several challenges in the court infrastructure as it relates to the prosecution and disposal of traffic offences, chief among them the volume of paperwork in the courts, allocation of space for storage and processing time”.

The e-ticket system, now enabling law enforcement to issue electronic traffic tickets, has been a deliverable for the Government of Jamaica since 2010. The digitised traffic ticketing system, which was launched simultaneously with the new Road Traffic Act on February, is designed to be a more efficient and accurate alternative to traditional written tickets. It provides cops with the ability to issue a printed ticket on the spot with information of the offence, fine, court date, and other information. With the electronic system, when a motorist is issued an e-ticket by the police, the individual is able to pay online right away using a smartphone.

The chief parish court judge said over the past few months the traffic court has seen an influx of printouts containing outstanding tickets for the said court to address. He said for the period September 2022 to January 31, 2023, approximately 11,491 printouts were submitted to the Corporate Area Traffic Court alone. As at February 1, 2023, he said, the estimated total number of outstanding tickets from the aforementioned printouts was 385,841 tickets, inclusive of approximately 579 e-mails received up to January 31, 2023.

“There is a saying that out of every adverse circumstance comes good. If anything was highlighted by the situation is the fact while the staff has really made good with the little we are working with over the last few years, we do need more resources, we do need to look towards working in a digital landscape not only to make us more efficient but also to assist us to better serve our court users,” Crooks said. For 2022, 70 per cent of the cases in the parish courts were for traffic offences.

In the meantime, he said based on an examination of the statistical report on criminal matters in the parish courts, for the year ended December 31, 2022, the entities “have done and continue to do very well notwithstanding the ever-present infrastructural challenges and resource constraints”. Crooks told the meeting that for the period under review the case clearance rate in the parish courts in the criminal division was 124.58 per cent.

“Basically this means that for every 100 criminal cases filed in the Parish Courts, 124 was disposed of on average,” he said.