Putting a positive spin on it, Harry Daley, the senior police officer who is being tried for corruption, might be considered lucky.

For despite the lengthy adjournment of his trial, by the time it resumes next month and joins the nearly 60 per cent of the active criminal cases in the magistrate's court deemed to be in the backlog category - that is, they are beyond the eight months which most reasonable jurisdictions believe to be reasonable for the disposal of cases - he will not, in the context of Jamaica, have languished for too long.

After all, we are reminded that Mr Daley, a superintendent who was in charge of the Spanish Town police, was arrested for extortion only at the end of July 2008, which is less than 10 months ago.

Many of the approximately 12,000 criminal cases which were in the dockets of magistrate's courts up to last October go back well beyond eight months, for years even. Indeed, at the Supreme Court, civil cases can take a decade to be heard, without even factoring in appeals. The criminal jurisdiction is hardly better. At the Home Circuit Court, for instance, these days each session ends with only a small proportion of the cases resolved and with hundreds traversed to the next session.

Failures in the courts

The consequences of these delays, of course, are not only to people like Superintendent Daley, who are charged with crimes. The failures in the courts and judicial process facilitate criminality and taxes the victims of crime.

Criminals can behave with impunity, confident in the fact that in the case of murder, less than half of the over 1,600 homicides that take place in Jamaica annually will be cleared up, which is merely to say that a suspect has been identified. And when a handful of the cases actually reach the courts, long delays sometimes allow space for witnesses to be intimidated, or worse, to suffer memory lapses; or opting not to bother. Cases' files sometimes go missing.

Moreover, modern, global economies can hardly afford such long delays in settling commercial disputes. Indeed, the slow court system is an impediment to Jamaica's economic competitiveness.

No single solution

This newspaper is aware, of course, that there is no single solution to the problems of the Jamaican courts, and, more broadly, of the judicial system, which contribute to the delays and, ultimately, the denial of justice to large numbers of people. Some initiatives stemming from the 2007 report of a Justice Reform Task Force are under way. But just doing basics of the overhaul will cost upwards of $100 million a year over the next several years. It is a price that the country has to afford.

However, there are some things which carry no price tag in dollar terms that can be implemented, including the changing of attitudes among, and demanding accountability from those who operate in the courts. Judges, for example, might start with insisting that lawyers end the too-common practice of double-booking, being scheduled to appear in one court for a specific case, but booked on the same day, at the same time, for another, elsewhere, before a different judge. Cases are then adjourned.

Judges, except in the most exceptional of circumstances, must clamp down hard on such undignified games and demand that lawyers get on with the business of justice.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.