Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
PRESIDENT OF the Court of Appeal, the Hon. Ian Forte, has joined a number of his colleagues in expressing dissatisfaction with what they say are numerous mistakes being made in verbatim notes of evidence taken at criminal trials.
"In recent weeks I have to be correcting a lot of words in the transcripts," Mr. Justice Forte said on Tuesday, while presiding in a manslaughter case in the Court of Appeal.
VERY BAD
A senior deputy director of public prosecutions, who was representing the Crown in the case, agreed. "This particular transcript was very bad in terms of the notes taken," he said.
One Supreme Court judge was equally unimpressed, describing the system of note-taking by the court reporters as outdated. The judge suggested that perhaps the problem could be reduced significantly if the government provided tape recorders for evidence to be recorded, especially, he said, when summations are being made to a jury. This, the judge explained, would all but guarantee accuracy.
"One mistake could prove fatal on appeal because a guilty man could be freed and an innocent man remain convicted," the judge said. He also pointed out that the court reporters' verbatim notes were the official record of the court and judges were not given the opportunity to check the notes of evidence or the summations after the trial.
Court of Appeal Judge Seymour Panton said yesterday that while some court reporters produced excellent transcripts of court proceedings, he had to admit that there were mistakes in the transcripts produced by others. He said there were situations in which they, as Court of Appeal judges, had to reconstruct a sentence "because it just does not make sense and you know that an experienced judge could not be saying this sort of thing." He said proper proofreading of the transcripts was necessary.
SOME JUDGES MAKE MISTAKES
Justice Panton admitted that some judges were also making mistakes, adding that "all of us are human". He said in Cayman, judges were given the opportunity to review their summations after the records were produced.
Some of the court reporters complained yesterday that they were still without sufficient stenograph machines to man the courts. They said the acoustics in many of the courtrooms, including court two and three at the Home Circuit Court, St. Catherine, Manchester and St. Mary Circuit Courts, were very bad and that sometimes affected note-taking.
