"Low literacy is critical before a person even enters the criminal justice system. It is critical in everything we do in our society. We are a literate society. We depend on the written word for record keeping, for applying for such opportunities as jobs, insurance, universities, welfare, for making statements, for telling people what we are doing. We have a social assumption that ordinary people in the society read and write fluently.

Unwittingly, the criminal justice system can cause injustice because it does not recognize that low literacy is a kind of disadvantage. Some kinds of disadvantage are easy to see and once people are made aware of them as a problem, they can be addressed. Twenty years ago, we began to rectify the wrong we had always done towards people with mobility disadvantages and we put ramps up in our courts where we used to have stairs. We recognized that some people had a disadvantage in accessing justice. It was easy to see and we did something about it when we were motivated. It's not easy to see whether or not someone can read. In fact it's extremely difficult. And as with all forms of social disadvantage, it's embarrassing to the people who suffer from it, so they don't advertise it and don't admit it to strangers and particularly not to strangers in authority.

There's no such thing as a document being objectively clear. It doesn't do for a lawyer to say that a brief is clear. It is only clear if it is clear to the judge who is reading it. It doesn't do to hand a piece of written evidence to all the jurors if one of them cannot read and no one bothered to ask. We cannot afford to assume that every person who appears in court is fully and competently literate.

As the person whose job it is to administer justice in the courtroom, the judge in a criminal court is in a position of tremendous responsibility and opportunity to address this issue and to make sure that justice is being properly served."