Supreme Court representatives came under intense criticism yesterday from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) after the Auditor General’s (AG’s) Report for 2010 revealed that about 850 case jackets could not be found.
As a matter of fact, it was noted by the committee that only a sample of the Supreme Court’s case jackets, including the 850 that could not be found, were targeted by the AG’s audit, meaning that a more extensive search could find even more missing case jackets.
The revelation was made as the PAC resumed its scrutiny of the financial records of various state agencies. According to observations made by the Auditor General, “case jackets for criminal and civil cases were not properly filed resulting in 44 affiliations, 36 civil, and 770 criminal case jackets not being presented for audit.” It should be noted that the AG’s reports found that “the situation continued in 2011.
This issue was first taken up by APNU committee member Volda Lawrence, who said that the matter is a serious once since missing case jackets in the court system sends a very bad message to the public. There have been several instances over the years where case jackets, particularly in criminal cases, mysteriously vanished, causing a case to be thrown out.
These occurrences have given rise to suspicion that police ranks involved in the prosecution process and court clerks are in the practice of taking bribes to “make case jackets disappear;” and on at least one occasion a court clerk was held by police after it was suspected that he was involved in stashing such a jacket.
But the case jackets that could not be found by the AG’s officers are not misplaced; they just could not be retrieved from where they were being kept in time to be audited, said Acting Registrar of the Supreme Court Rashid Mohamed.
Mohamed explained to the committee members that there are many instances where cases which started at one court were transferred to another, therefore requiring the relevant case jackets to be transferred with the matter.
“Some of the case jackets are being used in pending cases and could not be provided to the AG for auditing,” he said.
This, he continued, would have been uncovered by the AG’s office if its officers had checked the register which contains information of the whereabouts of all the case jackets which pass through the court. Mohamed told the committee that this was not done, and added that the AG’s officers prefer to check the case jackets, as opposed to the register.
But Auditor General Deodat Sharma told the committee that his officers did check the register, and that they found that the system used by the Supreme Court does not facilitate the proper marking of case jackets which are sent to other courts. Specifically, Sharma said, the register does not afford his officers the number of the jackets they are in search of, making it difficult to track the said jacket.
Mohamed, on the other hand, argued that the transfer information was indeed in the register, and that it would have been picked up by the Auditor General’s office if its officers had scrutinised the document. Since his argument contradicted the Auditor General’s explanation, Mohammed was urged by the committee to review what he had said, since previous explanations did not coincide with his latest offering.
A few seconds of reflection and a brief caucus with his fellow representatives from the Supreme Court saw Mohamed withdrawing his arguments that the transfer numbers for the case jackets are recorded in the registers.
As it turns out, while a new number may be assigned to a case jacket if it is transferred from a Georgetown to the Vreed-en-Hoop Magistrate’s Court, there is no reference chronicling the jackets journey from Georgetown to Vreed-en-Hoop recorded in the court’s register.
PPP/C committee member Gail Teixeira, after mulling over the deficiencies in the court’s case jacket filing system, and noting the Auditor General’s report that the problem persisted to 2011, asked Mohamed if measures have since been put in place to deal with the problem. He responded in the affirmative and told the committee that no such occurrence took place this year.
But Teixeira said she found that hard to believe and expressed her lack of confidence in whatever steps Mohamed and his team would have taken, particularly since the matter of missing case jackets is a recurring one.
Eventually, APNU MP and Chairman of the PAC Carl Greenidge asked Mohamed to realise how important the matter is, and asked him to examine the option of cross-referencing case jackets thereby making them must easier for tracking for the auditing and other purposes.
