Justice delays

Court date wait list floods prison system

(Dec 23) failed to raise the issue of ‘‘Justice delayed is justice denied’’. Even without the effect of Covid-19 on our courts system, it seems to take even longer every year for criminal cases, particularly those involving trials, to be finalised in court.

This suggests that we do not have anywhere near enough judges available to

deal with the workload, and that there may be many unnecessary adjournments and remands causing delays. Perhaps judges need to take a harder line with those wasting the courts’ time with unnecessary delays without really good reasons.

During my 20 years working in the criminal justice system, in the 1980s and 1990s, itwas common for offenders to deliberately ‘‘game’’ the system, by being given numerous adjournments and remands to put off the day of ‘‘final judgment and reckoning’’, particularly if they were looking at a long prison sentence. My impression was that some lawyers were happy to go along with this, as they got paid more for all the extra, unnecessary court appearances.

Numerous offenders said to me: ‘‘I’m getting my case put off as long as possible, until I can be sure I won’t appear before Judge Bloggs for sentence, because he/ she will give me a long holiday in prison.’’

These unnecessary delays clog up our justice system, and probably waste a lot of legal aid funding.

Wayne Fairbrother, Levin