DPP gets assistance
Additional personnel have been assigned to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to assist in reducing the backlog of cases that have been plaguing the criminal courts in this country.
That’s according to Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Dale Marshall. He was speaking in the House of Assembly recently, as the House debated a money resolution in the amount of $33,535 for the DPP’s Office, to complete payment to the staff who have been specially engaged to work on resolving that backlog of cases.
“We are saddled with a large number of indictable criminal matters in the courts, many of which date back to over ten years and there are some inherent challenges, Madam, when you consider evidence taken 10, 12, 13 years ago at a time when the memories of man were fresh, and trying to conduct a criminal trial where the burden of proof is on the prosecution and the standard of proof, Sir, is beyond the reasonable doubt,” he said.
The AG’s comments came as he indicated that Government has appointed an additional three judges, making a total of five judges, who sit to hear criminal matters. But, he lamented that it is still not sufficient to reduce the backlog and so they took a decision in the last financial year that the DPP would review the oldest of the files and determine whether it was appropriate to pursue the cases or not.
“Our challenge, Madam Chair, is that our prosecution staff is engaged daily on the business of prosecuting the matters in the High Court. The preparation of cases for trial, whether it is a murder, a rape, a firearm [or] drug case, it takes a lot of time and they would have represented a severe drag on the resources of the Office of the DPP for the existing prosecution staff, in addition to their existing duties to have to also do that file review. And therefore we took the decision that we would engage three additional attorneys with the requisite amount of experience to do that file review and then make recommendations to the DPP,” he explained.
Marshall noted that identifying those attorneys took some time, as they were required to ensure that the attorneys were persons of impeccable character, so that the likelihood of them being influenced by the criminal element was virtually non-existent. In doing so, he said, the persons had to be polygraphed.
“I have to say that they are an enthusiastic crop of attorneys. I am hopeful Sir, that at the end of this contract period they would see themselves as having a solid interest in prosecution and that they hopefully would stay on in the public service as prosecutors. We’ve increased the number of judges, but the increase in the number of prosecutors has not really been commensurate,” he said.
Marshall explained that the prosecution staff has been increased by one and there is an advertisement out to recruit further prosecutors. He stated that the optimum number of prosecutors for this country is 15, but the office remains a few short of that at this time. (JRT)