A.G. releases new legal publications
He is not a politician–not yet anyway–so Attorney General Godfrey Smith is not burdened with a constituency of voters that he has to please. Free to concentrate on his portfolio, Smith has immersed himself in the job and has received high marks from both friends and foes for his initial moves to reform our system of justice. The A.G.’s latest project is not of the high profile variety, but the publication of several volumes of court reports will be invaluable to the legal community and help to establish some much needed credibility for the system.
Godfrey Smith, Attorney General
“The Belize Law Reports is nothing more than judgments from the Supreme Courts and from the Court of Appeal compiled. It is made usable by lawyers, judges, people in the judicial and legal business, and indeed the general public because of how it is structured. It comes with a subject matter index which is alphabetized.”
Stewart Krohn
“In addition to the reports on cases, the is another slim volume which is a guidelines for interviewing by police of people in custody. What’s this thing all about.”
Godfrey Smith
“It is guidelines on how you are to be interviewed or how you are to be dealt with, if ever you are in custody of police and you are being interviewed or questioned in relation to a crime. It sets out 17 points that are essential and fundamental that must be followed if you are to be interviewed by a police, when you are in custody, in relation to a crime. Very simplistically, it is not bogged down in heavy legal terminology, it sets itself quite simply from A to Z. We hope that it will do 2 things…this is obviously not to put more pressure on the police, who are already pressured to provide professional service, but it helps them, it in a sense educates them as how to go about doing an interview, how to deal with persons in custody and in a sense insulates them from making mistakes, which if they are made, would only cause their case to crumble in the courts. The flip side of that is while if it is followed, it protects the police investigative works, at the same time, it gives ordinary citizens of the country a chance to become very familiar with what their rights are when they are in the custody of police officers.”
Police officers who fail to follow the guidelines, which were published under the hand of Chief Justice Abdullah Conteh, will risk having the evidence gathered from the interrogation ruled inadmissible in court.
Shortly after Smith was appointed to his post, he issued an ambitious document, which outlined in ample detail the goals he sought to attain. We asked if his views had changed since the publication of that manifesto, entitled “Delivering Justice”.
Godfrey Smith
“Delivering it is a laborious, painful, and sometimes slow process. Yes, I have to confess, it is a sobering…I have sobered up, and the plans and objectives that I taught would have been met already, some of them have not been met. I continue to be very optimistic. I continue to receive the much-needed vital support of members of the Bar Association. We try to work as closely as we can with the judiciary and hope that on the first anniversary on the delivery of justice publication, we will be able to come back to the media as we had boldly come to them and announced what our plans are, and give a full report of what we have done in a year of effort.”
Stewart Krohn
“Can you say with full conviction today that the chances that a citizen can walk into a Magistrate’s Court or the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal sitting in Belize today and get better a quality of justice today than it could have gotten a year ago, or 2 years ago?”
Godfrey Smith
“I would say that the answer to that is yes, but not to…the quality of justice you can get today, as opposed to 8 months ago, I think is a bit better, but there is far more that needs to be done.”
While the court reports will be purchased largely by lawyers, the Judges Rules will be distributed free of charge in large numbers nationwide.
