JUDGES & MAGISTRATES A WASTE OF TIME

GET A FUCKING STENOGRAPHER

The weakest link in the chain of justice

 

Or learn short hand. Or get someone who knows. Jah, man!

The justice system has such a back log of cases that fellas spend more time on remand than they do in jail. That is not justice. That's tyranny. Expensive tyranny, too. Justice must be swift. When justice takes too long, it becomes a form of revenge.

But the magistrates and judges of St Lucia are still taking notes in long hand. And they seem to like it that way. I don't hear any of them crying about it. I guess it means that they do less cases in a day, which means less reading in the night, which explains why so many in the legal profession are excellent alcoholics who spend more time drinking, working out technicalities and fucking around than seeking after truth and justice.

Anyone who has ever been to court knows how frustrating it is to try to maintain a train of thought while waiting for a judge to finish writing down what you just said. It’s like watching primary school children take notes from their teachers. Freaking secretaries think faster than that and some of them didn’t even go to proper secondary school. So much for intellectualism…

Time to grow the fuck up.

This piece of garbage would improve Lucian justice

Time to speed things up and get some work done. Time to put the swift back in justice. The FLOGG is no fan of  police, but every time the courts lay some shit on the cops, one can’t help but think, “Fuck you, you 18^th century relic! At least cops are from the 20^th century.”

How this outdated system of recording the minutes of the court has survived this long is unfathomable. What is comprehensible is that it is a perversion of justice in an age of technology where there are endless different ways of recording the exact events in a courtroom without stopping every 30 seconds for a judge to take down his homework.

Fowl bumbum - the leading edge of judicial technology

And slow…. They might as well be dipping feathers in ink and using a blot cloth. They might as well make their own paper from papyrus while court is in session. It’s enough to make you senile. (Hmm, maybe that’s what happens to them….)

The amount of time they take to write, you would think they would at least have good penmanship. Unfortunately, anyone who has seen a raw page of judge’s notes can confirm that their handwriting is crap and worse yet, some of them have problems with spelling and grammar.

Good job, son. Way better than the pompous ass before you

Might as well put secondary school children on the bench, especially considering some of the asshole decisions coming down.

One would think that people who went to university, where lecturers have no mercy on slowpokes and dumdums, would have developed the skill of writing at the speed of conversation. Journalists can do it and most of them secondary school graduates with the most average results at CXC. Secretaries can do it. Bank tellers. A Level students. Nurses at the health center. Have all these people moved past judges on the evolutionary ladder? Are judges still so excited about having opposable thumbs that they can't move past the brilliant invention of the felt tip pen?

There is no good reason left for judges and magistrates to be holding up the pace of justice by taking notes by hand. The world is so advanced that even the cassette decks at the House of Assembly are outdated and asinine.  And yet those cassette decks are hundreds of years more futuristic than what happens in the so-called Halls of Justice.

The law is supposed to be one of the leading professions. And leading professions tend to to err on the side of advancement and progress.

Doctors, dentists, engineers, teachers, nurses and other professionals are in a constant struggle to improve with new developments in technology. Even street cleaners are power washing instead of hosing down sidewalks.

With all due respect, Your Worship, use the iPad and your BB

So why is it that the law gets to live in the medieval times and drag all of us back there with it? Isn’t it bad enough that the law is the highest paid liability industry in the world? Isn’t bad enough that lawyers never actually create wealth by lawyering? Isn't it bad enough that cops are under-funded and under-equipped and the DPP's office is consistently staffed by sell-outs and incompetents?

St Lucian justice has enough problems. We don't need judges to add to that.

The system of court recording is simply NOT GOOD ENOUGH, anymore.

Get a fucking stenographer.

And by the way, a reliable digital voice recorder costs $60 at Voyager. For  $120, you can have a back-up, in case you don’t trust technology. And if you still don’t trust the technology, then maybe we shouldn’t be entrusting dinosaurs like you to the administration of justice.

Pass this around to legal professionals. And tell them that was just a slap. There will be kicks in the ass in the future. If you don’t respect yourself enough to improve with the times, why should anyone give you more than an ass-boot worth of respect? Stop wasting people’s time. It’s 2013. Get with the program. Wake up and smell the cyberspace.

All ego, no self-respect. And the assholes think it's funny.