By Tahna Weston
A prominent attorney is expressing his discontentment with the jury system in Antigua and Barbuda.
Wendel Alexander says his preference is a judge-alone trial-a system which was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic but made permanent this year (2024).
“But in terms of conviction and actual trial process, I have reached the stage in my life where I think that I prefer a judge-alone trial. Sometimes I wonder what the jurors think when they go into that jury room.
“I am not confident in the jury system: one, the way in which the jurors are selected in Antigua and Barbuda. You’re seeing the same jurors over the next three, five years, so they become, practically speaking, bush lawyers; and they’re not able to deal with the number and the amount of legal issues that come before the court,” Robinson said.
He continued, “Even if the judge sums up the position of the law to them, they do not seem to be able to handle it. And most of the time, they assume what they think it’s supposed to be, and Antigua being a very small country, rumors on the street, they hear it every day, and they take some of it into the jury room.”
The law for criminal proceedings undertaken by judges alone being a permanent feature of the Antigua and Barbuda judicial system was a key recommendation of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court (ECSC) and former Chief Justice, Dame Janice Pereira.
“I am convinced, more than any other lawyer, that there are a few persons up at His Majesty’s Prison, serving time that have been innocently charged and innocently convicted. Time will tell,” he said.
The attorney noted that with a judge-alone trial, a judge has to give reasons for his or her decision on every legal issue that has been raised.
Alexander is of the opinion that the jury system should be removed for the most part.
“Secondly, the jurors, as I indicated, act on hearsay a lot and assume things that are not legally sound and with no base for it. And the issues, the legal issues to consider are just sometimes too serious for the jury. And therefore, a judge summing up in a half an hour or an hour is not enough for the jury to understand some of these legal issues, and some of them are very complex because criminal trials and the criminal jurisprudence now is a specialised area of law.
“And so, the time has come for — and this is where I commend the Attorney General — the time has come for us to move away almost completely from trial by jury. I have absolutely little confidence in the jury system in Antigua and Barbuda, and I am convinced of this more and more every day,” Robinson concluded.
Antigua and Barbuda along with Trinidad and Tobago, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Belize and a few other Caribbean countries implemented the judge-alone system in an effort to reduce case backlogs in the country’s justice system, especially for select offences.
