CHIEF Justice Bryan Sykes has declared seven of Jamaica’s parish courts now backlog-free.

According to Sykes, the parish courts in Hanover, Portland, St Catherine, St James, St Mary, St Thomas, and Westmoreland have cleared their backlogs, while the parish courts in Clarendon and Trewlawny should achieve this feat by the end of this year.

Sykes, who was speaking at the swearing in of seven members of the judiciary into higher office for the Easter term by Governor General Sir Patrick Allen, during a ceremony at King’s House last Thursday, explained that statistically, courts with under five per cent in net backlog, and 10 per cent or less in gross backlog, are regarded as being backlog free.

“The experience has shown that — at that level — the backlog, such as it is, is not impeding the disposition of cases, and so in practical terms it means that… seven parish courts in Jamaica…are, from a statistical standpoint, backlog-free,” said Sykes.

He pointed out that the net backlog across all parish courts in the criminal division is 1.37 per cent; while the gross backlog is at 11.61 per cent, and declared that already the parish courts are among some of the best-performing courts at that level within the region.

“Last year [parish courts] achieved an overall clearance rate of 124.48 per cent. That is to say that for every 100 cases coming in, 125 cases were disposed of. All the parish courts met the international clearance rate standard of between 90 to 110 per cent, and so that accounts for the current state of the reduced backlog in those courts,” said Sykes.

The chief justice pointed out that significant work has been done to get the courts to this stage, and argued that the most significant factor accounting for the reduced backlog in the parish courts is the productivity of the judges — not the introduction of technology.

“Not to say that technology is not important but the productivity of the judges has increased significantly, and that places us on course to become one of the best judiciaries in the world,” he said.

Sykes further noted that the time for disposal of cases in parish courts will be reduced following a review of their performances.

“Because the data is telling us that over 80 per cent of the cases are disposed of in 24 months, 70 odd per cent in 12 months, and so what that means is that we can now begin to reduce the time from filing to final disposition.

“The further refined analysis has indicated that there are certain types of cases which can can be disposed of quickly, and the cases that tend to take a long time are those that involve fraud or money laundering — those types of document-intensive cases. And so what we will be doing in the next strategic planning round is focusing on how we can improve the management of those cases to get them through in 15 months — that is, 15 months from the point of entry into the court system. And the other cases, we want to dispose of them within nine and 12 months,” said Sykes.

Turning to the Court of Appeal, Sykes noted that more cases are being disposed of, which means that significant inroads are being made into the backlog of cases for which transcripts are available.

“The Court of Appeal can’t do its work without the transcripts, and that has been a long-standing problem in the trial courts which we are making every effort to resolve with the introduction of digital recording systems,” informed Sykes.

He said that the expectation is that within the next 18 to 24 months the complaint of delayed transcripts will be become a thing of the past.

“What that will mean is that we’ll get to the stage where we can actually go from trials — certainly in the parish courts — to the Court of Appeal, and having the appeal disposed of in 24 months. People may think that is impossible but it can be done with the appropriate technology,” he stated.

In his remarks, president of the Court of Appeal Justice Patrick Brooks said in 2022 the Court of Appeal team outdid itself in terms of productivity.

“The numbers show that we had a clearance rate of 111.69 per cent, up from 71.72 per cent in 2021. That means that for every 10 newly filed cases, we disposed of 11. We had an overall delivery rate of 449.05 per cent, up from 360.38 per cent last year. It means that for every 10 newly reserved judgements last year, we delivered roughly 45 judgements,” said Brooks.

“We had a date certainty rate of 85.56 per cent last year, up from 83.33 per cent the year before. And though the gain is modest, it is going in the right direction and we hope to achieve the international standard of 95 per cent in short order,” he added.