SWEEPING CHANGES ARE NEEDED TO CURB ERRORS BY COURT OFFICIALS

Anyone who has worked in an office filled with paper knows that
clerical errors do occur. And those errors can be costly -- for
example, adding a zero after a number can mean the difference between
your company making a tidy profit and going bankrupt.

When you work in a courthouse, errors can also be costly, but it's not
necessarily your employer who suffers the consequences. Indeed,
writing the wrong word on a document can literally deprive a person of
his her or freedom.

This is not just an academic argument. According to an internal review
completed in 2004 and obtained by The Vancouver Sun, people have spent
as long as 17 days in jail simply because a court clerk wrote the
wrong date on the file or entered the word "remand" into the computer
instead of the word "release." Many others have been subject to
wrongful arrests.

The review concludes that court staff "may not be as well versed in
their jobs as they should be and, in some cases, staff may simply not
be paying enough attention to what they are doing."

Yet it's clear that this problem extends beyond court staff. The
review also notes that police have on occasion failed to remove arrest
warrants from the Central Police Information Computer, and that a
contributing factor in at least one wrongful arrest was the failure of
the Crown to communicate with the defence counsel.

Even worse, police, justices of the peace and judges typically failed
to believe the victims of mix-ups, which smacks of a "we don't make
mistakes" attitude.

But now we know that justice personnel do make mistakes, mistakes that
compromise the very foundation of the justice system -- the
presumption of innocence. Attorney-General Wally Oppal has admitted as
much, saying, "I can't imagine anything worse than someone having
their liberty wrongly taken away from them. Obviously this is
something that I, as attorney-general, am very much concerned about."

Concern, though, is not enough. It's evident that the procedures
justice personnel use to prevent and detect errors are woefully
inadequate and in need of a thorough update.

The internal review makes several recommendations toward this end. The
review calls on the court service branch to ensure staff conduct
through reviews of files, including pre-court, during court and
post-court reviews.

Further, the report recommends that judges be fully apprised of its
content so that they're aware of the failures to detect errors in
court files. Officials are advised also to implement a consistent
approach toward internal investigations and staff discipline.

It's not clear whether adopting these recommendations will prevent
further miscarriages of justice, but it would be a good start, because
with every wrongful arrest or imprisonment, the justice system loses
respect and the province risks being sued for its negligence. Even
more important, all such incidents deprive innocent people of their
freedom, which should be of tremendous concern to everyone in a free
society.