Nine years after the publication, in the pages of the newspaper, of an article devoted to court clerks’ offices, denouncing their abuses and negligence, the clerk’s office of the Court of First Instance of Port-au-Prince appears to continue operating under the same conditions. The clerk’s office, the true memory of the court, seems to be struggling to survive. The conduct of criminal assizes with a jury provides a new illustration of this.

Three weeks after these criminal assizes were held, after not having been organized for eight years, one of the original hearing notebooks disappeared. According to information gathered by the newspaper, the situation does not appear to be causing much concern within the clerk’s office. The clerk responsible for preserving these notebooks confirmed it to the newspaper, as though it were an ordinary incident. “We still have not found the notebook. Sometimes that happens, and we find it later,” he told the journalist during a telephone interview on Tuesday, August 18.