Your Circuit needs you
By Tim Forte
You cannot read the press or the emails flowing from the CBA or Bar Council without seeing that the criminal justice system is ever increasingly a victim of the economic climate and budgetary constraints with immediate and pressing impact upon you, the practitioner.
There is no more money. Our fees are first capped and then cut, and it appears soon to be cut again. Court centres and judges are driven to be more “efficient”. What does “efficient” mean? It means more work by us, less time for us to do it and less and less money coming to us for doing it.
High Court Judges have repeatedly warned us that they are subject to increasing pressure to ensure that cases are heard promptly, punctually and swiftly. And they have told us that, if results are to be achieved, they have no option but to bring that pressure to bear at the coal face of criminal proceedings, i.e. the pressure is transmitted from them to us. As a prime example, that means an end to the culture of “I need more time before we start because…”
It is with this “because” that we need your help. There are (seemingly) ‘unavoidable’ problems at the beginning of many trials; some CPS-engendered, some defence solicitor-caused, some “just one of those things”. We need to started avoiding them.
Given that we will be on our feet either asking for time, explaining the delay or the problem, it behoves us to try to preempt the problems in the first place. The judiciary expects them to stop.
In order for the Circuit to approach the Courts and Resident Judges with suggested procedures to minimize the problems that “waste valuable court time”, we need to collate evidence of what problems practitioners face at the outset of trials, such as:
- Non-service of evidence
- Non-disclosure
- Witnesses not warned
- Defendants not proofed
- Late returns
- Late applications
- Late indictment changes
For example, the case stayed at the close of the Crown’s case due to disclosure problems caused inter alia by late return to counsel of the prosecution brief. Or the case where the trial was aborted after 7 days because of late service of a vital schedule, causing the need for a three week re-trial 7 months later. Or even the court centre where all anticipated trial problems have to be raised with the Resident Judge before any trials can be vacated, leading to a number of trial listings being ineffective.
These are not meant to form an exhaustive list but an idea of the various problems that we face day in, day out.
So please contact us to tell us:
- Any problems that you have encountered over the past months which threatened to, or did, delay, or even de-rail, your trial;
- What measures you or others were able to take to avoid or minimize any delay or de-railment;
- What procedures a specific court centre has to minimise delay or derailment, to what extent it works, whether it penalises the practitioner fiscally (i.e. incessant “freebie” mentions) and to what extent it is fair.
Only if we have this sort of information from all our practitioner members can we begin to formulate a proposal to Court Centres and Resident Judges to get the best possible procedures in place to ensure that the system works efficiently. If the system is efficient, then the budget has theoretically more money to pay the practitioners. We can work more effectively, with less aggravation and time wasted.
So please send the information we need to help you to the following places:
- Instances of problems caused by the Crown, i.e. so CPS/police, etc (but not CPS fees, which is a discrete issue being dealt with separately) to Alisdair Williamson at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
- Instances of problems caused by defence solicitors, Courts, those responsible for the defendants’ custody, etc – to Tim Forte at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Please do get in contact as soon as possible. We need only few lines but feel free to make it longer if you have more information. We cannot begin to help you unless you help us.