Government will be enacting new criminal procedure rules which are intended to speed up the course of criminal trials.
Attorney General Dale Marshall made the disclosure today, as he delivered an address at the opening of the three-day CARICOM IMPACS Crime Gun Intelligence Unit’s In-Country Sensitisation and Awareness Meeting, at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
At the end of the ceremony, Mr. Marshall told the media: “The criminal procedure rules have been with the [Barbados] Bar [Association], … the Commissioner [of Police], … Office of the DPP, [and] all the stakeholders since May. [They have been] invited to return with comments by mid-August.
“We are now going to be having a symposium, again with all of the stakeholders, so we actually go through the rules with everybody. If there are issues, we flag them then, if there are things that we can do better, we take into account the experience of the judges, and the experience of the lawyers…. So, I expect that by the end of September, these new criminal procedure rules will be in place.”
The Attorney General explained that it was necessary to relook the criminal procedure rules since they were in existence for many years.
In the area of criminal justice reform, Mr. Marshall said he was pleased with what had already been done. He disclosed that in the last 18 months, the criminal justice system had disposed of 584 cases.
“Of those 584 cases, 67 were murder cases…. To be able to get through 584 cases and dispose of them in an 18-month period is phenomenal; it is unheard of, and I think it is an indication that the things that we’ve been putting in place have worked.
“The new initiative that we’ve put in place, the Plea Bargaining legislation which will allow people to enter an early plea or negotiate a plea and sentence with the DPP, is also going to help us to move things through quickly…. So, there is a whole variety of things that we are putting in place to try to see the criminal justice system move quickly,” he stated.