New procedures have been adopted by the Central Criminal Court to tackle a backlog of rape and murder cases caused by last-minute adjournments of trials.
Before starting yesterday to fix trial dates for a 65-case list, Mr Justice
Morris said he wanted to draw the attention of barristers and solicitors to the practice direction issued in the past few days by the President of the High
Court, Mr Justice Costello.
Mr Justice Morris said that with the present listing system each case was assigned a trial date so that, up to now, it had not been possible to call up a case to fill the gap left by adjournments.
In future, cases would be allocated a trial date. However, if a case was unexpectedly disposed of the next case in the list would have to be ready to start.
The need to do this arose from the rights of the defendant to a speedy trial in accordance with law, which was obviously paramount.
"But coupled with that is the right of the community and, in particular, the right of the alleged victim and those persons associated with the alleged victim to have the trauma of the trial over without undue delay," he said.
Mr Justice Morris said three judges had been assigned to take trials in the next term. It was also intended to have a monthly call-over list to fix dates, to review the length of cases and to fix trial dates at the initial arraignment of cases where possible.
He said the direction by Mr Justice Costello had been made necessary by the unusual number of applications for adjournments which were made in respect of cases awaiting trial in the last law term.
As a result of these adjournments the present list to fix trial dates was
"unexpectedly long," said Mr Justice Morris, who has been assigned over-all responsibility for the listing process.
Recently, other judges have voiced criticism of applications for adjournments of trials.