Jury out again: yes Sykes
“HE IS too good looking to go prison, him Orville Taylor guilty yes but mi couldn’t say so!” This is an actual quote overheard by an unnamed bystander as the police officer, who investigated the case, out of earshot, literally cried tears. Such is a jury trial. Similarly, despite the hard work of my learned counsel who presented a good case, the jury found that the arguments and evidence were preponderant, and the Boss’ world shrank to a tiny cell.
One case from 2007 sticks out like a sore thumb in my mind, where from all appearances the jury got it wrong. And despite a ‘page’ and telephone threat that I should have shut the discourse down, the public were able to express their outrage, given the brutal nature of the crime and the expert witness. Nonetheless, despite the wonderful freedom of expression that we have enshrined in our Constitution, cases are tried in the courts and not on radio or in the newspaper. Whether we like the decisions or not, we accept them unless there is a right of appeal.
Not being a lawyer, one does not understand why trained lawyers would take their chances with a set of amateurs, especially when it comes to the life of an accused. The irony is that my lawyer friends will rebuff me with the same disclaimer that I do not understand the law. Well, touché!
I stand with Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, as he touts the removal of jury trials. Despite the imperfection of judges, they know legal facts and understand what legal evidence is. Moreover, anyone trained in linguistic programming knows how easy it is to sway a crowd or jury.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Yet Justice Sykes only touched the tip of the iceberg. Inasmuch as we have a great justice system, we have a major shortcoming regarding where we place our most experienced and competent judges. Our best and most experienced legal minds must occupy the most critical place in our judicial system; not necessarily the most prestigious. As a matter of fact, the most important court is, unfortunately, one with the lowest status.
Generations of lawyers and judges have learnt from the decades or even centuries of legal guano, to fertilise their contemporary minds. Legal practitioners don’t have to know the law; however, they know where to find it. Landmark or seminal cases are hidden in full view in journals, texts or even on a reputable website.
In our Industrial Disputes Tribunal, a quasi court with awesome powers and a high degree of national consensus among its stakeholders, every single award is made available to the public with clear explanations for the awards. These thus become instructive to litigants later on.
As a society we have literally turned our priorities on their head and the resultant stench is simply that we are reaping what we sowed. Lord Denning’s cliché about the law being an ass is applicable. And the longer we stick our heads in the mud, the more social pathologies we will reap.
It is a major shame on this society that there is no body of knowledge readily available to the autonomous parish court judges, who in secrecy can take all kinds of liberties in family courts. All social workers, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists know that the parent/ child relationship and the family unit are the cornerstones of all behavioural outcomes later. Thus, given the fragility of the child, one cannot open a children clinic without graduate and usually doctoral degrees in paediatrics.
SAME NEGLECT
It is the same neglect our policymakers had shown regarding early childhood development where today our least qualified, wellintentioned amateurs are building the next set of Jamaican leaders. Some 65 years after Edith Clarke wrote My Mother who Fathered Me, educated Jamaicans, who preside over the future of our nation, do not know that the book spoke to the minority of 30 per cent of households with an absent father. If our own justice minister, one of the best legal minds, can raise policy issues based on false narratives on family patterns, imagine a lesser jurist who is a parish judge.
Fact is, unless you did degrees in social work or other behavioural science, despite your Steve Urkel first class honours and distinction in your law degree, you are a rank amateur when it comes to family matters.
I bet you that despite the census data, survey of living conditions and the JA Kids Study carried out by my UWI colleagues, many of our legal minds and judges still believe that the average father is absent or ‘wutless’. Let me keep you scared with facts. Research irrefutably demonstrates that abuse by a mother is the best guarantee that a boy will become a multiple murderer. Too many educated amateurs occupy expert positions regarding our children’s welfare.
Although I could have used other means of communicating it, I take this medium to ask the chief justice to engage a small team of social scientists, preferably sociologists or social workers, to look at the data relating to children who have been the subject of Family Court judgments in the past 20 to 30 years.
Hopefully, we will finally put our children first and save the next generation.