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Justice Mohammed Ibrahim got a second chance when Vetting Board annulled its own decision/FILE

Kenya

Judges Ibrahim, Nambuye get second chance

However Justices Jean Gacheche and Joyce Khaminwa were not as lucky and have been found unsuitable to serve in the Judiciary chiefly due to delayed judgments.

The first set of complaints Khaminwa faced related to the issue of delayed judgments and rulings. A cause list retrieved from the Milimani Law Courts indicated that as at February 3, 2010, she had 63 pending rulings and judgments dating as far back as 2006.

According to Rao, she did not deny the delay instead saying that there was too much work over the years, that there were no sufficient judges and that judges were overworked.

“Every day I was getting a cause list to deal with. By the end of the day I accumulated judgments and rulings to be written. It would be unrealistic to expect a judge not to accumulate outstanding judgments from day to day. Rulings and judgments are, therefore, done during a judge’s spare time,” she is reported having told the vetting board.

Justice Khaminwa failed to tell the board the average number of rulings and judgments she delivered per month and the longest period she had kept a decision in abeyance. The board termed her inability to respond as ‘disturbing.’

She was found to have recorded less than impressive monthly returns for instance only managing to deliver less than 20 judgments in the whole of 2009.

The judge who was represented at the interview by her husband John Khaminwa was also put to task over her judgment in a case where she summarily punished a litigant and two officers of his company for contempt of court for having published a newspaper advertisement dealing with an issue in the litigation.

The board in arriving at its decision observed that the judge had been slowed down by illness and that she was a bit out of touch and that she continues to be held back by the aftermath of her illness.

“The time has come for the judge to call it a day. It is not enough that her spirit is willing, if she is no longer able to perform her work with the levels of diligence and competency required for the management of her own court then, however commendable her record and however painful her departure she has ceased being suitable to serve,” the board ruled.

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In the matter of Gacheche, the board ruled that she had not made a strong case for review, as she had agreed during the vetting that the process was fair.

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