Q Should lawyers be required to pay if they waste courts' time?
Unprepared counsel is bad enough, but in an individual appeal not likely to be as big a waste of court time as counsel advancing an unarguable case in the first place. This is perhaps not as uncommon as some of your readers might think.
One example is Criminal Appeal No328 of 2004, heard on May 24, 2005 where the Court of Appeal said of senior counsel's arguments: 'With the greatest of respect, we are astonished by [counsel's] submission, made with complete disregard to the prosecution case and the findings of the judge.'
The court reflected counsel's submission by not only dismissing the appeal, but by increasing his client's sentence by three months to reflect the lack of merit involved.
The situation was compounded by another senior counsel who took the case to the Court of Final Appeal. That court dismissed that appeal without oral hearing on the grounds it disclosed no reasonable grounds for leave to appeal.
In cases where appeals are manifestly and wholly unarguable, the courts should consider making a certificate of unarguability, the consequence of which ought to be that solicitors' and counsels' fees be not recoverable in whole or part from their clients.
