Waiting Time Before Justice in the Law Sector: A QUEUEING Theory

Abstract

The legal system in Nigeria is be-deviled with delayed justice which has become a source of concern to many person. This is very much peculiar to those who feel that the judiciary is too slow in resolving legal issues in Nigeria. In Nigeria, there abound court cases especially those of criminal dimensions that have ongoing for years now without reaching a conclusive conclusion. The study is aimed at modelling the queuing system in the magistrate courts in Onitsha Magisterial districts. The specific objectives include: to apply the M/M/2 and M/M/3 models with identical and parallel queues to criminal cases in the Magistrate court and to compare the efficiency of the two models and in either cases to determine time to justice in criminal cases in the Magisterial District. The results of the study show that M/M/2 model with 2 identical and parallel queues have an expected number of cases in the system as 39 with 50% idle time while the M/M/3 model with 3 identical and parallel queues have an expected number of cases in the system as 23 cases with 64.88% idle time. The comparison of the two models shows M/M/2 with 2-identical and parallel queues is more efficient as it has more number of cases to attend to and less idle time. The study therefore concludes that the delays in the disposal of cases especially those with criminal nature may not be attributable to the queuing systems in place. Even though lesser number of servers is seen to be efficient, this may not be advised. Increasing the number of servers though will increase speed of disposal of cases, may also lead to increased idle time of servers. As more courts being set up may result in waste of resources, manpower and time as the 2-server system is efficient in speeding up justice delivery in the magisterial division.