NCJ Number
180242
Date Published
March 1998
Length
30 pages
Annotation
This is a descriptive overview of the context and process of felony justice in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
Abstract
The study was undertaken to generate needed information about the context of felony justice in the court and to help define appropriate areas of judicial accountability. The analysis is based on a review of felony cases and the felony case process in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, one of the busiest courts in the State (Louisiana), with over 7,000 criminal filings annually. This is the only court in the State with exclusively criminal jurisdiction. A random sample of 25 percent of all felony cases that closed during 1997 was reviewed. The official court records maintained by the Orleans Parish Clerk of Court were the principal source of information for this research. The three performance areas chosen for analysis were case processing time, compliance with American Bar Association time standards, and pending caseload. The research identified a deterioration of the court's felony caseflow process, most notably in the increase in total disposition time for the court as a whole and an increase in the degree of difference among sections of the court, with the slowest section of the court taking approximately five times as long to dispose of cases as the fastest section of the court. Additionally, in the absence of a well-defined continuance policy in the court, the number of days lost to pretrial continuances varied widely between court sections. These findings indicate that during the last year the court has continued to neglect problematic areas of felony caseflow identified in earlier research. This report provides recommendations pertinent to the institutionalization of proactive docket management policies and procedures. For the follow-up study (1999), see NCJ-180244. 10 exhibits