Judge Edgar Hernandez Mejia, a member of the Supreme Court, warned judges that they may not criticize the new Code of Penal Procedures, and that they must enforce the new rules beginning on 22 September or resign from their posts. Magistrate Hernandez Mejia said that, with the application of the new procedural codes, the age-old practice of archiving case files for years would come to an end. The Supreme Court justice stated that he has seen cases that were 14 or 20 years old and still without any definitive sentence. Justice Hernandez also said that since the new code had been approved by Congress, it was the judges’ mission to enforce it as best they could. While he feels the public will benefit from the new procedures, he said that history would assess whether the reformation of penal procedures was right or wrong. He also noted that the former code had been in use for over a century and that it was very well known by the lawyers who use it every day. He said that lawyers are generally resistant to changes of this nature, but that this was understandable since the changes were not merely a reformation of the old code but a substitution of one code for another. Furthermore, the new code comes from the Anglo Saxon judicial tradition, which, he said, is another culture, another tradition. On a personal level, the jurist said he felt that the many parts of the new conventions are much better than the former code. In an important piece of information, the judge said that Law 278-04 provided for a period of simultaneous courts that would liquidate cases brought under the old code, while the other would deal with cases under the new code.