Nearly 900 prosecutions never reached court because the accused were never served, the Chief Magistrate reports.

Every one of those cases is a driver or defendant who was charged but has never been tried, convicted or sentenced. Once police charge someone, the case is filed at the court and a summons telling the accused when to appear has to be delivered to that person; until it is, the court cannot hear the case. For road offences that matters more than the fine. Under the Traffic Act, the penalties that take a dangerous driver off the road, a ban of at least twelve months for drink-driving, 24 months for driving while disqualified and twelve months for driving without insurance, are imposed only on conviction. A driver whose summons was never served keeps the licence, keeps the car and keeps driving, and if that driver is uninsured and causes a crash, the other party pays. Chief Magistrate Angelyn Hernandez put it in one phrase: "Many of the offending persons are often men of straw," people who cannot pay a judgment against them.

The 888 figure is in the Cayman Islands Judiciary's Annual Report and Accounts 2025, signed off by the Chief Justice in April 2026, listed for tabling in Parliament by the Attorney General, Samuel Bulgin, on 30 September 2026 and published on the Parliament website. In her report on the Summary Court, the Chief Magistrate wrote that the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service (RCIPS) had reported "888 unserved criminal and traffic matters, many of which go back several years". She described them as "individuals who have been charged but who were never brought to Court", and said she had told the Director of Public Prosecutions that "a concerted effort will be made this year to ensure that these are addressed".

Why it reaches every road user

The same report asks Parliament for stiffer penalties for drink-driving, driving without insurance and driving without a licence, and gives the numbers behind the request: in the four months from September to December 2025 the court received 79 charges of driving while intoxicated, 98 of driving without insurance and 86 of careless or dangerous driving. The Chief Magistrate wrote of "repeated offenders" and "a dangerously high number of people driving on the road without being qualified" and without insurance, adding that when such a driver causes a crash, the other party is not covered.

The two findings sit in one document and bear on each other. A stiffer penalty is a deterrent only for the driver who expects to face it. A driver who learns that a charge can sit unserved for years has learned the opposite. And the people on the other side of those cases, the person injured by an uninsured driver, the family waiting for a dangerous-driving charge to be heard, wait with them. The Coroner's Court, which the Chief Magistrate also leads, ended 2025 with 137 matters pending, several of them still with the RCIPS.

The RCIPS reported six fatal collisions in 2025 against 11 in 2024, a 45% fall, but a 5% rise in collisions overall to 3,408. "Driving behaviour and attitudes on our roads continue to be a safety concern," Commissioner of Police Kurt Walton said when he released the figures on 22 April 2026. The service recorded 277 drink-driving offences in 2025; 65% of those drivers were at least double the legal limit and 25% were three times over it.

What the court has said before

The 2024 report, tabled on 27 June 2025, recorded 1,034 new traffic matters filed in Grand Cayman and 692 disposed of, a clearance rate of 66%, and noted "a considerable number of traffic matters filed by the police which are not served" and therefore never put before the court. Those cases were excluded from the clearance figures, so the published clearance rate counts only the cases that arrived. The 2025 report records 1,493 traffic matters filed in Grand Cayman, a 44% increase on 2024, alongside 6,180 RCIPS traffic tickets. Its statistics table also carries an entry of "72 not served" against the first line of Grand Cayman filings; the report does not say which category of case that entry covers or whether it forms part of the 888.

The report does not say how many of the 888 are traffic matters, how far back the oldest goes, why service failed, or what happens to a file once it has gone unserved for years. The court's own 2025 statistics come with a caveat printed above them: accurate records of dispositions are unavailable because of an incomplete migration of criminal matters from the old case system. Separately, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) reported in its 2025 annual report, also tabled this autumn, that 1,143 cases were initiated before the Traffic Court during the year.

The record contains one commitment and one project. The commitment is the Chief Magistrate's: a "concerted effort" with the Director of Public Prosecutions during 2026, with no detail of what it involves, who will carry it out or how the result will be reported. The project is the RCIPS e-ticketing system presented to the courts in 2025, which concerns tickets rather than summonses. Nobody on the record has said why the summonses were not served, what resources service requires, or what will be done differently.

Why a summons goes unserved

The report gives no reasons. Summonses go unserved for three kinds of reason, and the report is consistent with any of them. The first is that the accused cannot be found: the address given on charge was wrong or out of date, the person moved, or the person left the Islands, which in Cayman includes work-permit holders whose permits ended between charge and summons. The second is that the accused could be found but was not pursued: too few officers assigned to service, summonses ranked below serious crime and below the ticket system that collects 96% of its fines without a court appearance, or files passing between the police, the ODPP and the court registry with nobody owning the next step. The third is the system itself: the 2025 report records that accurate disposition figures are unavailable because of an incomplete migration of criminal matters from the old case-management software, and the 2024 report says the number of matters filed "does not correlate with the number of matters served". A backlog that "goes back several years" fits any of the three, or all of them. Whichever applies, the effect is the same: the older a case, the harder it is to prove, as witnesses move and memories fade, so a summons served in 2026 for a charge laid in 2022 may be served too late to matter.

The penalties on the books

The law the Chief Magistrate is asking Parliament to revisit is the Traffic Act (2026 Revision) and the Vehicle Insurance (Third Party Risks) Act (2012 Revision). Under section 3 of the insurance Act, driving without third-party cover carries a fine of CI$2,000 and three months' imprisonment, with a twelve-month disqualification unless the court finds special reasons. That matches her description. Under section 23 of the Traffic Act, driving while not qualified carries a fine of CI$4,000 or twelve months, or both. Under section 89, driving while disqualified carries CI$2,000 or a year, plus a further 24-month ban.

On drink-driving, the report says the offence "carries a maximum penalty of 6 months imprisonment even for recurring offenders" and that the penalties did not change when the alcohol limit was lowered. Section 82(3) of the Act as consolidated provides a first-offence maximum of CI$1,000 or six months, or both, and for a second or subsequent offence CI$2,000 and twelve months, or both, with disqualification of at least twelve months in every case. The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) asked Judicial Administration to clarify the basis for the report's description; it had not responded by TCJ's deadline.

The blood-alcohol limit was cut from 0.1% to 0.07% by the Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2022, which came into force on 10 October 2022.

Parliament has already given Cabinet one tool it has not yet used. The Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2024, passed on 16 December 2024, inserted section 103A, under which Cabinet "may make regulations to provide for a demerit points system". As at 30 October 2026, the legislation page of the Department of Vehicle and Drivers' Licensing listed no regulations made under that section; the three sets of traffic regulations made in December 2025 and in July and August 2026 deal with fees, definitions and licence charges. The Ministry of Planning, Lands, Agriculture, Housing and Infrastructure, which leads the National Road Safety Strategy 2023 to 2038 under Minister Jay Ebanks MP, was asked whether demerit regulations or higher fines are being drafted and on what timetable. It had not responded by TCJ's deadline.

A fund for victims of uninsured drivers

The report goes beyond sentencing. "Perhaps the time has also come," the Chief Magistrate wrote, to explore "a Motor Insurance Bureau on the UK model". In the United Kingdom, the Motor Insurers' Bureau is a non-profit company set up by motor insurers in 1946; it compensates people injured by uninsured drivers and by drivers who cannot be traced, and it is funded by a compulsory levy on every insurer that writes motor cover, under the Road Traffic Act 1988. The cost is passed to policyholders through premiums. Cayman has no equivalent body: a person hit by an uninsured driver here must sue the driver personally, which is the problem the phrase "men of straw" describes.

The report does not say how a Cayman bureau would be funded, or what it would add to a premium. The Traffic Act already allows the Director of Licensing to enter an agreement with insurers to update the vehicle register when a policy lapses, under section 6(4A). The Ministry was asked whether that agreement exists and how many registered vehicles show no insurance on record; it had not responded by TCJ's deadline.

The ticket court

The court has already changed the way it handles the simplest road cases. On 5 September 2025, after more than a year of training, the Judiciary opened a court for traffic tickets only, sitting every other Friday and presided over by three Justices of the Peace. The Chief Magistrate reported that it deals with up to 80 tickets in a day. The RCIPS has also presented an e-ticketing system to the courts; the report says the Judiciary awaits the outcome.

Tickets are not the problem the report describes. Of 7,172 tickets issued in 2024, 96% were paid. The unserved matters are the summonses that follow a charge, the cases that carry prison and disqualification, and the ones a stiffer penalty is meant to deter.

What TCJ asked

TCJ sought comment by email on 30 October 2026 from Judicial Administration, the RCIPS, the ODPP, the Ministry of Planning, Lands, Agriculture, Housing and Infrastructure and the Ministry of District Administration and Home Affairs, which is responsible for policing policy under Minister Nickolas DaCosta MP. The questions covered how many of the 888 are traffic matters and how old they are, the service rate by offence type, what the "concerted effort" with the ODPP consists of and when it will report, whether unserved files are withdrawn or kept open, and whether Cabinet intends to make demerit regulations or raise the fines the Chief Magistrate has described. None had responded by TCJ's deadline.

The Chief Magistrate's own commitment was for "this year". The next annual report, covering 2026, is due from the Chief Justice in the spring of 2027, and the Ministry's road safety strategy sets a target of a 30% cut in road deaths by 2028. Until the service figures are published, the 888 stands as the only count the public has of charged drivers the court has never seen.