延迟司法报告的费用

problems and solutions surroundingcourt backlogs TABLE OFCONTENTS INTRODUCTION During the pandemic, courts have made heroic efforts to adapt so theycan continue serving citizens. Despite this, COVID-19 has exacerbateddelays to the point where the costs — both financial and human — are onthe verge of becoming a national crisis. costs are not well understood.The ability to reduce delays depends on making thehelp courts make sense of the delays they areexperiencing, but we have also tried, where possible,to illustrate some of the solutions. Where courts have brought in processes and technologies to maketheir systems more productive, we want to show how right choices, and those choices must be informed byinformation. There is no shortage of data relating todelays to justice; individual courts, jurisdictions, andumbrella organizations have carried out researchthat works and what effect it has on delays — in bothqualitative and quantitative terms. “ DECONSTRUCTINGTHESE PROBLEMS INDETAILMIGHT HELPCOURTS MAKE SENSE transparency in our court systems. Therefore, wehope that this report helps you to make betterdecisions in pursuit of justice. to delays to justice and contains new data fromThomson Reuters clients and partners. administrators, and prosecutors from across thenation’s judicial branch to understand some ofthe qualitative, human costs of delayed justice. EXECUTIVESUMMARY The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the State JusticeInstitute established what constitutes a delay to criminal justicewith the publication ofModel Time Standards for State Trial Courts1. gathered for the NCSC’s Effective Criminal CaseManagement (ECCM) project3— a survey of 130state courts in 21 states — analysis shows thatnone of these jurisdictions fully met the model timeCOVID-19 pandemic began to disrupt the activityof U.S. state courts, and it is clear from otherstudies that periods of shutdown have significantlyincreased case backlogs. A key finding from Thomson Reuters’The Impacts of the COVID-19Pandemic on State & Local Courts Study 20214was that one-third of the 238 state and municipal to which these targets — both the upper 365-daylimit for felony cases and the 180-day limit formisdemeanor cases — have been missed. However,the data shows that felony cases are more oftencompleted within these timeframes. Furtheranalysis of the ECCM data provides some insightcourts surveyed reported backlogs to have“increased greatly” in the previous 12 months.The human impact of these delays to justice hascome to the fore in recent media reports. Expertssuch as Meg Garvin, Executive Director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute at Lewis & ClarkLaw School, have warned of the negative effect thatthese delays are having on the confidence of victims, EXECUTIVESUMMARY Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, criminal justiceresearcher and associate professor at BrownUniversity, argues that delays impact defendants’“basic rights and dignity.”6The lawsuit, brought bySan Francisco’s public defender against the Sandefendants in felony cases, the potential for costsavings rise considerably, to an estimated $9 millionon average per jurisdiction.Lessons from courts going virtual during the pandemic — and from highly improved jurisdictionssuch as Webb County, Texas — show how this canbe done. Technology adoption has a key role to playin caseflow management. For example, a surveyof users of Arizona State Courts9in the wake of thepandemic found that over two-thirds thought theywere “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to continue long existed in caseflow management. Accordingto the NCSC’s analysis of the data it has gatheredin the ECCM, the factors most effecting caseprocessing time are the number of continuancesand hearings per case.8the use of digital evidence after the pandemicrecovery. Courts should continue to embracetechnology to not only reduce post-pandemicbacklogs, but also deliver speedier justice. SUBMITTED, SHARED,AND STORED ON ONEUBIQUITOUS PLATFORM,THIS MIGHT EASE SOME to one per case could — even under conservativecost estimates — save on average $2.3 millionper jurisdiction per annum for misdemeanorcases and $0.9 million per jurisdiction for felony OF THE BURDENS ANDPROVIDE GREATERTRANSPARENCY, WHILE DEFININGTHE NATURE OFNATURE OF DELAYS 1 across jurisdictionsDetermining the effect of increasing caseloads andthe impact of the pandemic on delivering justice How to define delays in felony andmisdemeanor cases What constitutes a delay to justice?“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a common legal maxim widely attributed to British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone. The implications of delays to justicewere definitively set out to the American Bar Association in 1970 by United StatesChief Justice Warren E. Burger: “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential tomaintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people.” According to Burger, one Quantifying inefficiency and delay to justice is a difficult task. B