When I was a practicing Quantity Surveyor here in the late 1980’s to early 1990’s I remember one of our projects was to do a cost exercise on an extension to the existing Court House in George Town. It was badly needed.

The project was shelved for lack of funds and it was not considered by the government at the time to be essential.

In 2007 the plans that had been drawn up for a new courthouse were put on hold because of a financial crisis.

We move on to 2014.

Nothing has happened. There is still no new courthouse and the courthouse is still the same size!

In the Chief Justice’s speech at the opening of the Grand Court, Wednesday (15) he said, “for more than a decade the local judiciary has been in need of a new court house and in the time since government had acknowledged and made plans for it, the situation has only got steadily worse. Given the growing criminal case load, efforts have to be made to address the problem of space as it is seriously hampering the dispensation of justice in a timely fashion.”

Both the Cayman Bar Association and the Law Society have also voiced their concerns that the Court House is inadequate for the caseloads Cayman is currently experiencing and is growing all the time. In every division of the courts from family and finance to criminal and court of appeal the work is piling up.

Chief Justice Anthony Smellie warned the jurisdiction was falling short of international standards and was at risk of falling foul of its own constitution with the increasing delays in justice. He said it was taking over a year for criminal cases to reach trial. This was double the international benchmark and he revealed 94 Grand Court cases from 2013 were being carried over to 2014!

Although he acknowledged there was a shortage of defence attorneys and other issues pertaining to the management of cases by the police and from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the problem of space was the biggest barrier to speedier justice.

There may be hope, though, and we all seem to live on hope. The President of the Cayman Bar Association, local attorney Dale Crawley, in his presentation said his organization were in discussions with the government to turn the former government building, the Glass House, into a courthouse.

With the start of the New Year seeing already an abundance of criminal activities including robberies, fights with knives, and police chases through the streets of George Town and beyond, we have almost reached the point of violent criminals being let loose on our streets because the time allowed by law in getting them to trial has passed.

We may need a new cruise terminal but tourists won’t come here if the wave of violent crime increases much more.

The problem when making budgets is the items at the very end of the chain get the least attention. Every link in a chain is reliant on the weakest.

I hope government was listening intently to the Chief Justice’s words.