THE PROPOSED plea-bargaining legislation is a bad idea. Law cannot maintain its majesty when it caters to the lowest common denominator in human nature.
British common law is majestic. It was not born of religion or superstition. Even the Romans knew to keep them separate, something that the Spanish Inquisition and the American Salem Witch trials forgot.
Plea-bargaining is a present-day American legal institution. It goes hand in hand with grand jury indictments, which proceedings are conducted in secret. The system goes like this: somebody is vexed with you, goes to the district attorney, and you're indicted.
This is where they get to ask you a whole lot of questions, and you mightn't even know who's accusing, or even be clear about the charge.
SAD DAY FOR JUSTICE
But the outcome is usually a charge of conspiracy, a charge invented in the latter part of the 17th century by the infamous Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys of England when he was pleasing the king.
It was a sad day for English law, because Jeffreys had invented an offence of the mind.
When King James II abdicated, a mob discovered Jeffreys in disguise as a seaman trying to escape. The mob took him before the lord mayor, who sent him to the lords in council, by whom he was committed to the Tower where he died.
Today in the United States after a grand jury indictment, where all the pre-trial publicity has already ruined you anyway, they might send you to trial. And the whole way through the process the burden of proof is upon you to prove yourself innocent.
Most of the extradition cases today where Jamaicans are sent to the U.S. for trial on conspiracy charges result from grand jury indictments.
Recently the case against Arthur Anderson, one of the top five global accounting firms, for its auditing of Enron, was thrown out of an American court. But once the indictment was filed two or so years ago, all its clients fled. It is now down to 200 employees, who mainly handle indictments.
And we don't want to think about the innocent people in the U.S. hanged in criminal matters. Nor the members of the jury who make book deals on the cases before them while they're hearing the evidence.
That is not a system of justice to copy in any particular jurisdiction. It's a rich people's system of justice. In a poor country the law is supposed to be the only friend you really have.
That is where its majesty has always lain. The law becomes elegant in the execution of the duties of civil servants under the Westminster model, which is the first line of defence for the ordinary citizen. Any humble person can go to Customs or the tax office to ask a question and be properly guided. You always come out in better shape than you went in. It used to be that way too with the police stations, but it is no longer so as a rule.
That aspect having become ragged, the Government now proposes to make it even more raggedy still by instituting plea-bargaining. Unsavoury people are now to be rewarded for misconduct and breaking the law. The only insurance against perjured testimony is the certain guarantee of no reward, except the unwilling satisfaction of having told the truth.
The Patterson administration has never been able to handle a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Now it wants to legislate 'maybe', because that is all it knows.
Most of my life has been lived under British common law here in Jamaica, and the bulwark of it, which is a properly functioning civil service under the Westminster model.
I realised this was a privilege, when as a young adult, I was invited to the Boxing Day celebration of the 30 or so top public servants in the country, and their families.
Not a single politician or company head was there. Not even the then Minister of Finance. I was in the company of mandarins. They were the most graceful company it was possible to imagine calm, serene, in-the-know, able, and not a single bribe-taker among them.
HONOURABLE SERVICE
They were confident that a swift solution existed for every problem, all written down in the staff orders and the laws of the land. Nobody needed to teach the civil service about customer service 30 years ago. That is what they were there for, and they knew it. They had signed up for public service because it was one of the top professions in the country.
The Patterson administration has subverted that service, with the executive agency model and boards of private sector people and consultants where the Permanent Secretary becomes a figurehead. Few such agencies and boards even know the rules of the civil service much less the law.
This is going to lead to droves of private sector firms specialising in both, and getting contracts from the Government, or acting as an interface with it, as happens in the U.S.
Here we can still walk into the police station or the tax office to ask a question, without a tap being put on our phones because we must be up to no good. We are not regarded with suspicion, but treated as ordinary citizens in search of help and information.
Under a system of law which contains grand jury indictments and plea-bargaining, because it is but a short step from one to the other, an innocent remark can lead to ultimate destruction. It's later stirred in with envy, greed and fecklessness.
Plea-bargaining makes a kangaroo court of justice, where the law is disregarded for one, but not the other. This is the very definition of a frontier or backwoods court, yet Mr. Patterson calls himself progressive.
Jacqueline Samuels-Brown made a presentation on behalf of the Jamaican Bar Association to the House of Parliament on this very vexed question of plea-bargaining. She said it would encourage people to lie to save their own skins. She need only have added that people require no legislative permission to do so.
The Most Honourable Prime Minister has proven himself abjectly unable to govern a country in which 'yes' or 'no' applies. It is nigh impossible for him, or anybody else, to administer a country in which there is only 'maybe', endlessly compounded by corruption and incompetence.
