by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Dec 15/97) - Everything that could conceivably go wrong with justice in the North did go wrong in a single high-profile trial last week.

At a murder trial in Iqaluit, there weren't enough potential jurors to form a jury pool, even after the court attempted to literally pull people off the street, and there were too few Inuktitut translators on hand to hold the trial even if there was a jury.

Problems with translation and jury selection have arisen in cases across the North, but rarely do both problems happen at once, or are so pronounced.

Court officials tried everything they could imagine to stage the trial despite the problems, but finally had to adjourn it for three months.

"Everything went wrong there," said Pierre Rousseau, the North's chief prosecutor. "There were quite a number of problems."

Deborah Robinson, the Crown prosecutor in Iqaluit, said every effort was made. "The trial was adjourned only after every other avenue had been exhausted," she said.

"This was after a number of witnesses had travelled to Iqaluit, family members of the victim attended at their own expense and inconvenience ... it was very disappointing."

A Clyde River man faces trial for murder. He was charged after a Jan. 1, 1997 death.

The NWT Supreme Court arrived in Iqaluit anticipating a trial that would last between five and seven days, beginning Tuesday, only to encounter problems immediately.

They found only 81 people had been served with a notice to report for jury duty, and of those, 11 had already been excused for various reasons.

Of the 70 candidates left, only 43 showed up for jury selection, an unworkably small number considering Crown and defence could veto 20 people each without reason, and had an unlimited number of challenges for reasons such as a relationship with the defendant or an opinion on the case.

The court then took the unusual step of sending a sheriff out on the streets of Iqaluit to issue passers-by an order to appear immediately for jury selection.

"It is a very unsatisfactory way of getting jurors," Robinson noted.

The other problem was that some of the witnesses required an Inuktitut interpreter, the defendant needed one, and if any unilingual jurors had been chosen, then the entire trial would have had to be translated.

This would have required two qualified interpreters. Both had been arranged beforehand, but the only one who showed up was ill and the court was unable to find replacements on such short notice.

Justice critics have hammered the government for underfunding translation services in past months, and Robinson said the lack of translators is a problem in an increasing number of criminal cases.

"It's a fact, especially in the Eastern Arctic, that you need these services," she said.

Lawyers and court officials met in Yellowknife late last week and decided to attempt to hold the trial again in the second week of March.