Jamaica’s chief prosecutor has assured that matters committed to the rural circuits and which were delivered to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) prior to the passage of Hurricane Melissa last month are safe.

“We have the original files, so long as they [matters] are already before the court. Whatever was in the custody of the DPP’s office we still have. Documentary [and] exhibits would be on the files and the files are with us here in Kingston,” Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Claudette Thompson
told the
Jamaica Observer on Monday.

The assurance comes after indications by the judiciary Monday that there would be phased resumption of circuit court sittings across five parishes in the wake of the hurricane which struck Jamaica on October 28.

The court in Black River, St Elizabeth, was reduced to rubble by the hurricane, while the court in Santa Cruz, a portion of which fell on the neighbouring police station, suffered significant damage.

Addressing public concerns about the fate of cases for which exhibits and files in the custody of the police were reportedly destroyed by floodwaters, the DPP said “as it relates to documents which are potential exhibits, those too are safe. However, potential exhibits that were in the police stores, we are unable to speak to at this time. I expect that the police will do their own assessments and alert us. We will address each case file individually, based on what the police tell us,” she said.

According to the Court Administrative Services Division (CAD), circuit court matters for St James, Trelawny, and St Catherine were scheduled to begin Monday, November 10. Proceedings for Westmoreland will start on Monday, November 17, while St Elizabeth will resume on Monday, November 24.

Due to extensive damage in Westmoreland, all circuit court sittings for that parish will be temporarily relocated to Hanover. In St James, hearings will be limited to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until further notice, the CAD indicated.

The division further said the Trelawny Circuit Court will operate from Duncans with sittings held Monday through Friday, while matters for St Catherine are proceeding in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston. The CAD said both the St Elizabeth Circuit Court and the parish court will officially resume operations on November 24.

Head of the judiciary Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, in an audio-visual statement on Friday following a tour of court facilities on that side of the island, described the scenes as perturbing.

“It is really a very distressing sight, seeing the courtroom and the courthouse. I also stopped in Santa Cruz, but I feel hope and I feel heartened because, having been to Trelawny, St James, Hanover, St Elizabeth, then on to Westmoreland at a later date, tells us that all that we have been doing since 2018 in training the court operations managers, training the senior judges of the parish court, getting them ready to manage their courts and giving them the tools, it is in moments like this that you see the training coming to the fore,” Justice Sykes said.

He said the response of employees of the court following the disaster was commendable.

“What I am particularly pleased about is that in all the parishes the senior judges and the court operations managers have stepped up to the plate as leaders, which is what we expect of them and in these devastated areas — and here we are standing in St Elizabeth — the senior judges and operations managers have shown their worth and value,” he stated.

“They have been planning as to how to restart the delivery of legal services and people may have been asking why we have been engaging in strategic planning, risk management. This is why we do it, albeit, this is perhaps an extreme circumstance for it to come to the fore, but it shows you the value of planning, it shows you the value of evaluating risk, risk mitigation and how you are going to manage the different eventualities that come about and that is what has given me pleasure in the midst of this disaster,” the chief justice pointed out.

Sykes, who shared that the leadership of the judiciary had been meeting with the staff in the various courts, said, “although you can see the obvious kinds of distress and anxiety and concern on their faces, they turned up in Duncans, in St James, in Hanover, they all turned up to clean the courtyard and to get the court up and running”.

For St Elizabeth, where the destruction was more evident, Sykes said the community spirit had also prevailed.

“St Elizabeth is different in the sense that the devastation is so great here that there is nowhere to clean up here, but they are willing to come to work in the midst of their distress. A number of them have lost houses, they have lost their roofs, they have lost everything, and yet they are still willing to come to work, and so what we have to do now is to work with them to give them the support that they need and, of course, to work with the senior judge, the court operations manager, and all our stakeholders, the attorneys, the medical profession and all those that provide services to the court, the custos of the parish, to determine the best way forward,” he said.

THOMPSON… we have the original files, so long as the matters are already before the court