Polack Post: Caribbean Juries – The End?
By Peter Polack
The United Kingdom has recently announced an intention to creat a new level of courts without juries to streamline a system mostly caused by self made delays. If this follows the recent same sex imposition on British territories, they can expect the same in their courts shortly
History is replete with examples of legal authorities bending the legal system in favor of failed prosecutions. They need not worry about a template, many centuries old, that can lead to prison but has the appearance of fair play.
In the Cayman Islands many years ago, the government reversed the onus of guilt in drug cases that neither reduced drug convictions or slimmed prison populations. Prosecution incompetence, especially with search warrants, negated that effort.
There was also the useful preliminary inquiry that filtered many defective cases with sub standard evidence away from clogging the court system, often embarrassing the prosecution. The removal of those inquiries saw multi year delays in cases that later false supported a call for a new $200 million courthouse by those with no intention of fixing a broken system.
A self fulfilling prophecy.
Just recently in the Cayman Islands, juries discharged two serious cases and an appeal court quashed a manslaughter conviction because of the inappropriate direction by a trial judge. In one of the cases, the jury apparently disregarded the direction of the judge. There would be no such safety valve, post jury removal.
END
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.
His views are his own.
