Managing the Pace of Justice - An Evaluation of LEAA's Court Delay-Reduction Programs

• NCJ Number: 78838
• Author(s): D W Neubauer; M J Lipetz; M L Luskin; J P Ryan
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 444 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78-NI-AX-0076
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Justice (NIJ); US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub
• Corporate Author: American Judicature Soc
• Sale Source: Superintendent of Documents, GPO; National Institute of Justice/
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study uses time-series data gathered from case files and data from site visits and interviews to evaluate four programs for reducing delay in criminal courts. The purpose is to advance the state of the art in delay studies and in court management techniques.

Abstract

The report emphasizes that delay is integrally related to the politics and norms of local trial courts. An overview describes the mode of evaluation and working hypotheses and the four study sites: the general jurisdiction trial courts in Providence, R.I., Dayton, Ohio, and Las Vegas, Nev., and a limited jurisdiction court in Detroit. (These four courts experienced delays in processing criminal cases and responded by implementing delay-reduction programs with Federal funding.) The report addresses some dimensions of conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of case processing time and presents hypotheses on potential effects of case characteristics on processing time. Although the nature of the delay-reduction programs varied across the sites, all were management reforms. They involved increased formal coordination among courtroom actors (Las Vegas), initiation or modifications of assignment offices (Providence and Detroit), changes in method of case assignment (Detroit), or a coordinated package of management reforms (Providence and Dayton). Data analyses indicated that delay-reduction activities improved case processing time in all four courts, and, most important, that cases in the four sites were processed at similar paces subsequent to the delay-reduction activities. In Dayton, for example, median time dropped from 69 days from arraignment to disposition in the baseline period to only 43 days in the postinnovation period. The toughest 25 percent of the cases consumed a minimum of 104 days in the baseline period and 87 days after the innovations. Implications of these data for both practitioners and researchers are mentioned. Data tables and charts, chapter notes, case file data collection forms, interview guides, graphs, and over 100 references are supplied. See NCJ 79086 for an executive summary of this report.