At last, the virtual courtroom

In a laudable effort to enable the delivery of justice during the limitations of the covid19 lockdown, some important improvements are coming to the Judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago.

By next week, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi promised, there would be 12 virtual courts operating in this country. These are positive moves, amplifying the existing initiatives by the Judiciary to enable greater access to court processes using remote hearing technologies. Realistically, it would be reasonable to expect some hiccups with the system.

The video conference project at the Judiciary began in 2005 and by 2009, the court system had implemented video hearings for remand prisoners at the Magistrates’ Court in Scarborough with a link to the Tobago Prison. Expansion of the remand hearings by video conferencing was then planned for the St George West Magistrates’ Court, the San Fernando Magistrates’ Court, the Port-of-Spain Prison and the male and female facilities at the Remand Yard, Golden Grove, Arouca. This system took years to implement and for all the requirements of security and judicial fairness and transparency to be met.

The Judiciary seems well positioned to take advantage of close to 15 years of experience in remote courtroom management and to introduce what was meant to be a resource and time-management tool as a necessary evolution of the legal system to meet the challenges of a nation in isolation. The project, in progress for the last four years, is being brought to fruition at a point in the country’s evolution that while forced, is both necessary and overdue.

There are six virtual courts currently in operation and by the end of this week, the Judiciary is expected to bring six more into use for a total of four at Golden Grove, four at the Maximum Security Prison, one at the Eastern Correctional Rehabilitation Centre, one at the Women’s Prison, one at the Port of Spain Prison and one at the Youth Transformation and Rehabilitation Centre. The new project uses repurposed shipping containers rebuilt to serve as virtual courts at a cost of $70,000 each.

The expansion of the system will reduce the scale of the prisons transport system that shuttled inmates back and forth in a staggering investment of time and resources over the years. The Judiciary quickly issued guidance to the public and media about how the seating traditionally allocated to the public and the media in face-to-face hearings would be managed in the new virtual courtroom system after the first public hearing was done virtually on April 16.

It’s not the only change that has been accelerated by the challenges of isolation brought by lockdown measures made necessary by the threat of covid19. To relieve the pressures on the prisons system, 957 inmates have been identified as candidates for early release. Prisoners with less than 12 months of their sentences to be served and those held for non-violent offences unable to afford bail are eligible and121 have already been freed.

It’s a welcome move, and the only lamentable aspect of this rethinking of the prisons system was that it took the threat of coronavirus spread to make it happen when the dangers of an overpopulated prisons system had been clear for more than a decade.

There are more challenges to governance to come, some large and some small, but all will be activated by the urgency of our shared situation. There will be lessons to be learned from the changes ahead. Those adjustments will bring continued value if we engage these adjustments as a path to useful change.