NCJ Number
144028
Date Published
1991
Length
25 pages
Annotation
In 1991, the State Justice Institute's Courts Technical Assistance Project (CTAP), upon the request of the Administrative Judge for the Circuit Court for Baltimore City (MD), reviewed the court's felony case processing system. A primary concern was the decreasing proportion of guilty pleas in felony arraignment cases from a range of 20 to 30 percent from 1983 to January 1990, to 4.8 percent in September 1990.
Abstract
CTAP urged that the court must require all litigants to participate in the negotiation process at arraignment, and that greater communication be developed between criminal justice principals. To these ends, it recommended that an incentive should be created to dispose of appropriate cases at arraignment, rather than at trial, and that attorneys should take the responsibility for generating such dispositions. Other recommendations were that discovery should be exchanged and that the defense attorney must interview the client before arraignment. CTAP generally assessed the two special felony courts as far more productive than the regular trial courts, and it said that permanently assigning teams of defenders and prosecutors to a particular judge would enhance productivity. The project recommended creating a third special felony court to focus specifically on drug cases. Four appendixes show data on the the disposition of cases filed from May to July 1990, dispositions by criminal courts from October to December 1990, jail/bail defendants offering pleas at arraignment from February 4 to 15, 1991, and the impact of District Court screening on the Circuit Court caseload from 1973 to 1989.