Goffe

Jury duty continues to be avoided like the plague. Statistics from the 2007/2008 Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) Annual Report showed thousands of Jamaicans were still guilty of scorning their civic responsibility.

According to the report, 42,246 jury notices were received and processed by the Detention and Courts Division between April 2007 and March 2008.

Only 9,015 or 21 per cent of that amount were served.

Several reasons were cited for the high rate of non-service. While some persons gave excuses as to why they could not serve as jurors, the police lamented about accessing violence-prone communities.

"Many volatile areas were not easily acces-sible," the report stated.

Jurors were selected from the 2002 voters' list. This was also a problem.

"In most cases when the addresses were checked, the parties had either moved from the given addresses, were deceased or were not known. There were many informal addresses that could not be located by the servers," read another section of the report.

Susan Goffe, spokes-person for Jamaicans for Justice, said a public education campaign was needed to address the long-standing problem.

Goffe said people needed to be educated about the importance of jury duty.

"We can't complain about the justice system and not be willing to play our part when we are called upon to serve as jurors," Goffe said while saluting those who have answered the civic call.

Agreeing that justice delayed is justice denied, she said a lack of jurors was often the cause for the postponement of cases.

Goffe was stumped as to why the latest version of the voters' list was not being used to choose prospective jurors. "That really is totally unbelievable and it has been brought to the attention of the authorities," she said.

A recent amendment to the Jury Act has effectively expanded the jury pool. The change allows for the TRN registry to be used alongside the voters' list.

Efforts to get a comment from the JCF's Detention and Courts Division, which handles all matters relating to the jury process, were unsuccessful.