THE huge backlog in murder trials in the Midlands, and the need to assign five High Court judges temporarily to the province, three in Gweru and two in Gokwe, highlights the need to continue decentralising the High Court.
It healso brings into sharp focus, the violent crime rates in that province.
Until not so long ago, a single High Court judge on regular circuit could cope with the criminal trials reserved for the High Court in the Midlands, and because Gweru is so close to Bulawayo, a resident judge for the civil cases was not a priority.
When we come to the decentralisation of courts, we need to recognise that Gweru is very close to Bulawayo, little more than an hour's drive, so that there is just a modest drive for the lawyers involved in civil cases, the bulk of the High Court work.
This explains why Masvingo, Mutare and Chinhoyi, all smaller centres than Gweru, were the first cities and towns to get a resident judge after Harare and Bulawayo many decades ago when the High Court was originally set up in colonial times in the two cities.
These areas needed more than three hours for a drive to Harare or Bulawayo, so civil cases could be costly in lawyer's time and travel expenses.
The criminal trials now before the new resident judges were still done in the outlying cities, at least in Mutare and Masvingo as well as Gweru, by judges on circuit.
A judge would be driven down with their clerk and a senior prosecutor, and the accused, witnesses and everyone else needed in the trial would be assembled for the week or two that the trials were done.
Almost all criminal cases have been moved to the magistrates courts since the early 1970s when a major effort was made to ensure that all magistrates were law graduates, rather than people who had passed civil service examinations.
This allowed the new rank of regional magistrate, a magistrate of seniority plus proven competence and legal knowledge, to be created to handle an ever-growing slice of criminal charges that used to be reserved for High Court judges.
Over the years, and especially since the late 1980s, this group of seasoned magistrates has been given ever greater jurisdiction when it comes to sentencing and so have been able to handle ever more serious criminal cases.
At the same time regional magistrates were posted to provincial and even district magistrates courts, and so criminal justice, right from the lower level crimes a junior magistrate can cope with, to the serious crimes needing a regional magistrate, can be done close to the where the victims, accused and witnesses live.
We need to remember that criminal law is more direct than civil law and that there is less legislation.
Our criminal code is a single Act of Parliament, and while there are other crimes defined and other sentencing directives in other Acts, the bulk of our law applies to civil law, rather than criminal law.
Even if Gweru had received a resident judge, or even a pair of resident judges, the backlog of criminal cases would still be very large because of the very high rates of violent crime, murder in these cases.
This by all accounts arises from the breakdown of law and order in large blocks of the informal mining sector, where we have seen machete gangs, and artisanal miners going off the rails and getting drunk, abusing drugs and acting as if they were beyond and above the law.
That has led to violence between miners and groups of miners, as well as fights with others and attacks on others.
The police have done well. They have managed to arrest most of those involved and have brought them to court and had them charged and remanded.
That is why there is such a large block of murder cases for the five judges now on circuit in the Midlands to try.
But there are limits to what the police can do. They can only investigate and arrest you when you commit a crime, and have to wait until the crime is committed before they can take action.
So a lot of crime prevention must be done by others, basically the communities. Some of this will involve the police, when people take the time and trouble to complain of more minor offences than murder, and so raise the possibility that someone committing a murder has been building up to this through other violent acts.
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Perhaps if they had been fined or jailed for these non-lethal assaults they would be stopped from progressing to murder.
But for that to happen, the police would have to be told. They cannot be everywhere and they themselves continually remind the public that they can only operate efficiently when the public pass on information.
The Government is moving steadily to regularise the small-scale artisanal gold miners, which would include licensing them.
We think that the Government and the representatives of the miners could also work out a code of conduct that could be enforced by stripping the guilty of their licences.
This could easily be one of those point systems, so small offences would count as well as major crime.
We must realise that those five judges have been sent on circuit because there is a serious backlog of 150 murder trials, that is 150 violently killed people.
We cannot let this sort of violent death rate continue and we need to work out ways of bringing it down, significantly and soon.
