Prosecutor Julio Vacacela’s vacation on Tuesday forced the Eighth Tribunal to postpone, for the fourth time, Nelson Espinoza Revilla’s trial hearing. The 21-year-old is accused of stabbing his live-in girlfriend to death on May 21, 2012, after a fight provoked allegedly by jealousy.

The hearing had not been rescheduled because the prosecutor had not given enough notice of his vacation.

Family members of the victim, Denisse González Rivas, 18, criticized the prosecutor for taking his vacation during the final stage of the trial without delegating a colleague who could finish working the case. They fear the defendant’s order of remand will expire before the trial can conclude.

During the case of the 11 infants who died at the Francisco Ycaza Bustamante hospital there were three failed hearings before the Second Criminal Court issued a trial order against two of the accused doctors.

Just like these, 6,695 other hearings in the various Guayas courts and tribunals failed to occur between Jan. 1 and April 10, according to a study carried out by the Judicial Council and published on their website.

The data was analyzed by the Citizens Observatory for Judiciary, Prosecution and Civil Servant Transparency (OPTA-Justice), who released a report on Wednesday.

The study shows that the rate of failed legal hearings so far this year is much higher than it was during the same period last year. In the first trimester of 2012 in Guayas, only 1674 hearings were not carried out as scheduled (compared to the 6,695 so far this year).

But Guayas isn’t the only province where the rate of failed hearings is rising: in Pichincha, 2,025 hearings were cancelled or postponed in the first three months of 2012. During the same period in 2013, 5,353 hearings were cancelled or postponed.

Oswaldo Sierra, of the Fifteenth Criminal Court of Guayas, says prosecutors and defense lawyers are equally to blame. To a lesser degree, he says, judges can also be at fault for cancelled hearings.

He said that there has been talk of getting a piece of software that could keep track of different prosecutor’s schedules, so trial hearings do not overlap.

“Each court sets their own dates for the hearings, but we don´t know if any of the other courts is scheduling something for the same time on the day. That lack of coordination can make lawyers miss appointments.”

The OPTA-Justice report shows that the prosecution is responsible in 15 percent of the cases of failed hearings.

The OPTA-Justice’s director says their report has been delivered to the Director of the Guayas Judicial Council, and it will be up to that body to decide how to sanction the public servants identified as responsible for delays in the justice system.

For example, the report identifies one prosecutor, Héctor Cevallos Cruz, who was solely responsible for 120 instances of cancelled hearings so far this year.

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