The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2005 (PACE) is on its way to the Senate after it passed third reading in the House of Assembly last night.

PACE will completely modernise the Bermuda Police Service?s stop and search powers, arrest and detention of suspects, treatment in custody, questioning, evidence collection, sample taking, the admissibility of confessions and other evidence.

For years the Service had operated under the Judge?s Rules and a great number of additional legislation ? so much so that a flowchart of existing laws looked more like a piece of abstract modern art, Labour, Home Affairs and Public Safety Minister Randy Horton said.

?The legislation has become an entangled web of the many laws and rules that have become extremely burdensome for the criminal justice system,? Mr. Horton said.

Instead of the Judges Rules, the Minister of Justice ? Attorney General Larry Mussenden ? in consultation with the Chief Justice, Police Commissioner and Bar Council, will now write Codes of Practice for Police to follow.

Virtually all of the Police?s procedures of arrest, detention, investigation identification and taking samples will be rewritten.

An April 2004 Justice System Review Report made 42 recommendations ? including PACE ? and Government had completed 23 of them, Mr. Horton said.

However, PACE had been called for since November 1992 and again in August 2000 when a Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Serious Crimes said PACE would make Police accountable for their actions. He said the forward thinking legislation revolutionised policing in the United Kingdom when it was implemented in 1984.

PACE was born in the aftermath of the infamous Brixton riots in 1981, when Lord Scarman conducted a widely circulated and much discussed inquiry known as the Scarman Report which found the UK?s justice system was a mess.

Bermuda?s legal system is in a mess now, Mr. Horton said and we need a purpose-built criminal justice system.

The Minister said an education campaign would teach people their new rights under PACE.

The mammoth shake-up in the way Police, lawyers and judges do business will require intensive training, he said so to increase preparation time Government planned for the major provisions of PACE to come into effect after January 1, 2007.

However, he said some of PACE, such as documentary evidence provisions, could come into force sooner provided Chief Justice Richard Ground agreed.

The Bermuda Police Service had already advertised for a PACE Implementation Manager to start training in early 2006, he said.

A prisoner?s right to silence will not change.

Police wanted a negative inference to be drawn by silence, however, Bermuda?s defence lawyers argued against it and won, he said.

A main change in PACE is the time a prisoner may be held in custody ? 24 hours initially, 36 if a Chief Inspector permits, 72 if a Magistrate allows but the maximum will be 96 hours.

?Oftentimes, a community judges its judicial system and weighs its faith and trust in the justice system as a whole by the manner in which criminal investigations and trials are handled,? he said. ?Our criminal law must, therefore, keep abreast of developments in the community and must be able to provide a high level of fairness to the community as a body, to the victims of crime, to the defendants and to those convicted of crime that must be punished.? Mr. Horton said PACE would usher in a new era for criminal justice in Bermuda.