I wont say "TRINIDAD NOW HAVE DIS???" but ill change to a positive attitude and applaud them for making the right move
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Dead witnesses to speak
By ANDRE BAGOO Monday, May 11 2009
GOVERNMENT will tomorrow unveil new legislation which makes provision for the
use of video-taped statements of witnesses who have been killed before trial, to be shown to juries and which also introduces far-reaching changes to the criminal justice system.
Two bills, namely the
Evidence (Amendment) Bill and
the Evidence (Amendment) (No 2) Bill will be tabled by Attorney General Bridgid Annisette-George in the Senate and are expected to trigger national debate over the role of the courts in the fight against crime.
Among the changes proposed by the legislation, copies of which have been obtained by Newsday, are:
- new provisions for the admissibility of video and audio recordings of witness statements;
- abolition of common-law rules which prevent juries from learning of the criminal histories of accused persons before they reach a verdict;
- new measures to deal with the problem of fearful witnesses “forgetting” their evidence in court and
- re-introduction of a previously abolished law to aid with prosecuting persons accused of rape.
The legislation will be tabled and published tomorrow and is expected to be debated next week.
It has already been subject to behind-the-scenes consultations with the Law Association which will this week complete a report on findings for submission to the Attorney General.
The first bill seeks to amend the Evidence Act. It proposes to make provision for the admissibility of video or audio recordings of statements made by prosecution and defence witnesses and even the accused.
Clause 7 proposes to make such recordings admissible when “it is in the interest of justice for the video or audio recording to be admitted”. The provisions are open enough to allow the video-recordings of statements of witnesses who are killed before trial, lawyers said yesterday. The use of videotape or audio technology is not alien to the courts. Video-tape conferencing is frequently used in both civil and criminal courts.
Additionally in April, Justice Mark Mohammed allowed the written transcript of an audio-recording of a dead witness to be placed before a jury as evidence in chief. Yesterday, Acting Director of Public Prosecutions Carla Brown-Antoine noted that while the development of the common-law may leave the use of video-taped witness statements in court open, the new law could be a means of standardising the use of such evidence.
“It could standardise the conditions in which video evidence is used,” she said.
The laws also allow for the use of statements given by recalcitrant or reluctant witnesses to police. Currently such statements are admissible as a matter relevant to the credibility of a witness who back-tracks in the middle of a trial.
The changes would effectively allow the statements to be regarded as the witness’ testimony itself. Additionally, while written statements of witnesses who are fearful to testify are admissible in courts in certain circumstances, the new laws would widen those circumstances.
Clause 5 of the first bill also calls for the repealing of common-rules which limit how much a jury can know of an accused person’s “bad character”, particularly any past criminal convictions. The bill requires a special three-fifths majority.
The second bill will deal with cases of sexual offences. It will attempt to revive a doctrine long abolished which allowed certain hearsay accounts of a victim’s complaints of a criminal act to be admissible in court.
The new laws will be tabled at a time when the murder toll is approaching 200.
Yet, some are already questioning how effective the legislation will be in the fight against crime, especially given the lack of enforcement of older laws.
“We will be making the point that care has to be taken when amending existing laws when the record of enforcement of existing legislation has been poor,” Law Association president Martin Daly said yesterday of the Association’s expected report.
Former attorney general Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj said, “I do not think that there is a necessity to amend the law in order to fight crime. What we really need is administrative reform and more aggressive crime detection.”
