Stop wasting court's time with groundless appeals: judge
Lawyers warned to stop lodging unnecessary appeals or clients risk getting harsher sentences
The Court of Appeal issued a critical statement yesterday reminding lawyers not to lodge appeals that were totally without merit.
Such a move wasted judicial time and public money and delayed cases that deserved to be reviewed, the court's vice-president Mr Justice Frank Stock said.
Stock also highlighted the increasing use of incompetent legal representation as a reason for appeal, which he said was a groundless claim in many of the cases.
The judge warned that lodging a plainly hopeless appeal might lead the court to disregard the time the appellant had spent in custody awaiting the outcome of the appeal, departing from the usual practice to recognise it as part of the jail term served.
"All judges of the Court of Appeal have become increasingly concerned at the proportion of wholly unmeritorious applications for leave to appeal conviction and/or sentence coming before the court," Stock wrote in a judicial note after consulting all the appeal court judges.
The note came after High Court judge Kevin Zervos said in August, when he was still director of public prosecutions, that appeal court judges were saddled with too much work, resulting in unusual delays in delivering their judicial decisions.