The Jamaican Court System Experience

Copyright Jamaica Gleaner

No matter what happens, do not go down to the Traffic Court, it’s a mess. Number one, there is no parking, so you have to find parking outside. When you call the court office and mentioned ‘you have no parking here’ the response was ‘well, yes you know there is no parking inside here but you can find parking elsewhere and there is also parking next-door  but that is sort of an extortionist thing going on, but ah, yes, there is parking next door.’ Its $200 the men charge for parking over there. To make matters worse, its only cash they collect over at the court, no card machines.

Why should someone come back there? Especially when there are numerous police officers willing to take something on the side rather than write the ticket; a significant portion of them are hustlers. Now that its revealed how difficult it is to give the government my money, it is much easier and less time consuming to give the police man the money, because this system set up to breed, foster and maintain corruption.

Such inadequacies and inefficiency can turn a model citizen into a person willing to paying off police officers to avoid the hellhole that is the Jamaican judicial morass. The government is always starved for revenue and complains that they have no money, then it should make this the simplest, most straight forward process to facilitate the hassle free collection of revenue with ease. It could even be a drive-thru for god-sake, imagine... If there are two shops, one of the shops sell cheap and the other shop is a little bit more expensive but you get through quicker and easier, most people are going to choose to go to the shop they get through faster. Simply because time is money and no-one has time to waste like that. 

The judge was not even Jamaican! The judge was a Trinidadian woman who was throwing fines left, right and centre. The entire thing is a mess, the yard is a mess, the place is an old run down building with lots of wasp nests. When driving into the yard to park, a man in a white shirt and blue pants said that I can't park here, so I said ‘excuse me, where else am I to park?’ The man replied ‘well you have to park outside or over next door’, so I asked him if he works here? The man said yes, I asked if I could see his ID, apparently he doesn't have one. So how am I to know who he is? The man said I must go ask the government.

And furthermore, if you think that is bad, I drive pass the place about three times searching for it; not even damn street sign saying ‘Traffic Court’ or ‘Court’…  nothing … nothing is on the building! Not even the paint is properly on the building, is one broken down house them have and calling it courthouse. And I was there from 9:15am to 2:00pm.

Now let us compare that to the RM court on Sutton Street, Downtown. Granted the building is in considerable better state than the Traffic Court shambles of a structure but the system is as dysfunctional and decrepit as any of the other archaic and antiquate institutions of this plantation society. The judicial system is rife with the out-dated vestiges of colonialism which demeans and insults our sovereignty and self-determination. You’re told your case in on a certain date and to be there at 9:30am, what they don’t tell you is the actually time range / range your case will be or at least where on the list you fall.

It is as if the airline told you show up at the airport as soon as the airport opens and just wait there throughout the day until your flight comes in, whenever that might be, who knows, certainly not you. So you give up your entire day, waiting in a hot congested courtroom until they happen to get around to your case, not knowing if it is in the first quarter, the middle or near the end of the docket. No public schedule or notice board with the line up or anything. They could really borrow the flight schedule notice board from the airport.

Any business you have to do in this ‘pop-down’ country takes the entire day. It’s a failed state; no new infrastructure, just the archaic run down plantation structures of decades past. Yet persons of position get fat and wealthy, driving their expensive new SUV brought at taxpayers’ expense and build mansions on the great hills that tower into the sky.

There is no accountability, the people who suffer through it are voiceless and those who can influence change are immune to the constraints of such, thus they never experience it. So nothing changes. So basically working and middle class people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.