Between February 1, 2023 when the new Road Traffic Act took effect, and March 27, a total of 66,428 tickets were issued for violations, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck told the House on Tuesday as he proposed that the Electronic Transactions Act be amended to improve efficiency and productivity in the island’s courts.

According to Chuck, of the 66,428 tickets, payment was made for 27,617 at the various tax collectorates across the island, 246 were settled in the courts, and 5,511 will likely require the issuance of warrants in the short-term.

“When taken in the context of the fact that the remaining 33,054 matters generated over the last 55 days have still not been brought before the courts, along with the approximately 981,921 unpaid tickets issued up to January 31, 2023, the monumental task facing the court, if reliance is placed on warrants issued by handwriting, cannot be discounted,” Chuck insisted.

The justice minister outlined his argument in a ministerial statement, saying that improved service delivery standards, reduced turnaround times and enhanced data collection opportunities are positive spin-offs from a fully functioning modernised court system.

According to Chuck, there are aspects of the country’s existing legislative framework that preclude the automatic roll-out of advanced operational processes that are commonplace features in any modernised justice system.

“The proposed adjustment to the identified legislation would provide the required enabling environment to bring Jamaica’s court system in line with approaches currently being employed in other jurisdictions that are geared towards reducing bureaucratic impediments that impact the achievement of operational efficiencies,” he said.

“A foundational activity in support of this push to increase efficiency would be the utilisation of electronic signatures as a means of authenticating warrants generated electronically in the justice system and the recognition of electronic documents/records as records of the court,” Chuck argued, adding that the court system in Jamaica is highly paper-based and legislative adjustments are required to facilitate the acceptance of electronic records.

Chuck reminded fellow legislators that in the 2022 first-quarter statistics report the chief justice had stated that “significant reforms in areas such as the warrant management process are required to improve productivity” as more than 70 per cent of the total annual case load in the court system is comprised of traffic matters.

“During this quarter, 60,096 new cases were filed in the traffic division of the parish courts across the island, of which only 12,191, or just over 20 per cent, were disposed of. With the vast majority of these cases requiring the issuance of a warrant, the sheer volume of the documents required creates an unwieldly and untenable situation in the island’s courts, as the demand for the timely execution of the process outstrips the available human resource capacity,” the minister said.

“The unfortunate reality is that the existing process used in the courts to generate warrants is not sufficiently expedient to meet its current needs and requires an appropriate and immediate fix, namely the ability for judges to utilise an electronic signature in the issuance of warrants,” he argued.

Chuck pointed out that the use of electronic signatures, affixed through a secure process approved by the court and governed by legislation, obtains in other jurisdictions such as Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Indiana, and Maine in the United States; Rwanda; and Scotland.

“The electronic signature is then represented as a digitised image of the handwritten signature and the documents signed in this manner usually carry the same force and effect as if the judge had affixed his or her signature to a paper copy of the document,” Chuck said.