Chief Justice Leslie Haynes has issued a firm warning to attorneys that the Court of Appeal will no longer tolerate late submissions, stressing that delays are crippling the court’s ability to function efficiently.
“We need to be able to do that—keep the wheels of justice turning,” he said.
The warning came after attorneys in a scheduled hearing in the No. 1 Supreme Court involving two men convicted of murder, one appealing his sentence and the other challenging both his conviction and sentence, asked for an adjournment in the matter. The panel of judges, which also included Justices William Chandler and Victoria Charles-Clake, was informed that written submissions from the appellants had been received only two days prior.
“We have a problem,” the chief justice said. “When we come here, we give dates for the filing of submissions, and what are we to do? Are we to dismiss the matter when the submissions are not filed?”
Haynes stressed that trial date certainty is central to judicial efficiency and that timely submissions are not optional. He said the court cannot continue setting hearings that fall apart on the day.
“We have a difficulty, and the difficulty is that you are going to hear that the Court of Appeal is not doing matters as they should. We sit every day and we are not getting any matters done. This is why, at the opening of the law term, I said that we have to do better with our trial date certainty . . . and doing better with trial date certainty must mean that submissions must be filed on time,” he stressed.
“If we are allowed to prepare and settle with the written submissions and counsel comes to this court prepared, then the judgments will be delivered at a quicker pace,” he said. “Everything affects something else.”
Rejecting any suggestion that attorneys are being forced into rigid deadlines, the chief justice said counsel are always allowed to request more time in advance.
“We have never, so far as I am sitting here together with my brothers and sisters, forced counsel into any particular date,” he said. “So, therefore, we would like the submissions filed on time . . .. If we don’t have that, the whole process is disrupted. . . it just goes haywire. . . . So when we are not properly prepared, it has a knock-on effect. We need to remove that knock-on effect in order to increase the efficiency of these courts.”
The post Chief Justice issues warning over late court submissions appeared first on Barbados Today.
