DPP: Introduce a system of plea bargaining

Director of Public Prosecutions, Charles Leacock, QC says a plea negotiation or plea bargaining regime needs to be incorporated into this island’s legal system.
Leacock suggested that such a mechanism would assist with reducing the number of cases which make the way to the High Court for trial. He stated this while noting that “as of yesterday [Tuesday], we had 832 cases on the criminal calendar to be tried, of which 70 are murder cases. We cannot try that volume of cases with two judges which is what we are at now”.

“Secondly, some delays are basically systemic. Now that we have abolished preliminary inquiries, we will have committals of cases so they will come faster to the High Court, but when you get to the High Court we are going to have a bottleneck there again now because we only have two judges sitting. We need a system, for example, for plea negotiation or plea bargaining regime whereby people can get an indication of if you plead guilty for this, this is the likely sentence you are going to get. So we need a system with a plea bargaining which is what has been introduced in England and so many other places because we cannot actually have a trail of everybody unless we have [maybe] ten judges sitting,” he explained.

Leacock, who was the guest speaker at the Rotary Club of Barbados South’s meeting at Accra Beach Hotel and Spa on Wednesday, further told the media that the High Court’s time would be better spent dealing with serious criminal matters.

By way of plea bargaining, he said that you would “get rid of some of the cases like property offences and some of the minor woundings and all of the one-bullet cases and some of the ammunition cases that all now have to come to the High Court, to get some of those out of the system so that we use the High Court time to trail the serious sexual and grievous bodily harm cases and murders and those things”.

It was further noted that, “Juridical time is finite so we have to work out what we try and try to get as many of the cases away that can do without having to go to the High Court by way of plea bargaining.” (MG)