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If you have issues viewing or accessing this file contact us at NCJRS.gov. • .. .-- ! • - - • ,. _:. _:. •• - -" _: _ ••• _w Courts That Succeed Six Profiles of Successful Courts By WILLIAM E. HEWITT GEOFF GALLAS BARRY MAHONEY 125932 U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice This document has been reproduced exactly as received from the person or organization originating it. Points of view or opinions stated in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the National Institute of Justice. Permission to reproduce this copyrighted material has been granted by National Center for State Courts to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS). Further reproducti:m outside of the NCJRS system requires permis sion of the copyright owner. National Center for State Courts ------ - - -- ----------- ----------- ©1990 National Center for State Courts Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8798 Publication Number R-120 ISBN 0-89656-102-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hewitt, William E. Courts that succeed: six profiles of successful courts I by William E. Hewitt, Geoff Gallas, Barry Mahoney. p. cm. - (Publication / National Center for ~tate Courts; no. R-120) ISBN 0-89656-102-X (paperback) 1. Court congestion and delay-United States. 2. Court administration-United States. 1. Gallas, Geoff, 1946- . II. Mahoney, Barry. III. Title. IV. Series: Publication (National Center for State Courts) i R120. KF8727.H49 1990 347.73'13-dc20 [347.30713) 90-42494 CIP The research that is reflected by these six profiles was part of the demonstration courts element of the Large Court Capacity (LCe) Increase Program, which was supported by Grant Number 87-DD-CX-0002 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The demon stration courts portion of the Lce was funded in two phases. Phase 1($87,948) and phase II ($87,624) funding provided 100 percent of the costs for the demon stration courts. The Assistant Attorney General, Office of Justice Programs, co ordinates the activities of the following offices and bureaus: the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies ofthe U.S. Depart ment of Justice. ii Contents Page Introduction and Acknowledgments v PROFILES Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas (Dayton) 1 Detroit Recorder's Court ................................ 23 Fairfax (Virginia) Circuit Court. 45 Maricopa County Superior Court (Phoenix) . 83 Wayne County Circuit Court (Detroit) . 103 Sedgwick County District Court (Wichita) ................. 127 Appendices ........................................... 161 iii Introduction and Acknowledgments Courts That Succeed profiles six metropolitan courts that share successful histories managing problems of delay. It is one component of an ambitious program undertaken by the National Center for State Courts (NCSc) and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). Called the Large Court Capacity Increase (LCC) Program,l the effort included two major projects: the Trial Court Performance Standards Project and the Caseflow Manage ment Project.2 In quite different ways, both projects seek to increase the capacity of the nation's largest state trial courts to provide efficient and fair adjudication of an increasing number of cases, many of them drug related. As part of the LCC program, six courts agreed during 1988 and 1989 to become open houses for the study and exchange of practical information about how caseflow management theory is applied in courts on a day-to day basis. The profiles were written to serve, literally, as visitor's guides for court officials whose interest in reducing and avoiding delay would lead them to visit other courts that shared their concerns. These profiles serve as armchair visitor's guides. They offer a sourcebook for ideas, encourage ment, and perhaps even inspiration to court managers who face problems of delay in their courts. They may also interest lawyers and members of the public who are concerned about issues of litigation cost and delay. This introduction has fom objectives: (1) to place the demonstration court project and the profiles in the context of the developing tradition of research and action to improve the pace of litigation; (2) to explain why these six courts were selected for the demonstration court program; (3) to contrast and compare the six courts; and finally (4) to underscore our sense of the book's audience as those engaged in practical efforts to improve the nation's state courts. v vi Courts That Succeed Background and Theoretical Framework of the Demonstration Court Project The demonstration court project is part of a tradition that is of relatively recent origins. It is anchored by Caseflow Management in the Trial Court (Solomon, 1973) and Justice Delayed (Church, et aI., 1978). Three shared beliefs unify the writings in that tradition. • Delay is case processing time beyond that which is necessary for a fair resolution of a case, and such delay has a negative effect on the quality of justice; " Delay is a problem of major public importance and is perceived as such by the American public; • While delay exists in many courts, it is not inevitable. It is avoidable through actions courts can take within their own authority, and where delay exists it can be reduced dramatically.3 Some of the literature in this tradition makes the analogy between delay and ill health.4 The authors of Managing the Pace of Litigation (Neubauer, et al., 1981) conclude with this observation: Delay, then, can be a symptom of some severe maladies afflicting courts, ranging from lack of effective management controls to the lack of desire for such controls. Like some patients in our medical analogy, some courts fear that the proposed cures will be worse than the known problems. (p. 432, emphasis added) That analogy has utility for Courts That Succeed. Paying attention to symptoms and evaluating their significance in context is an essential ingredient both in the administration of cures for disease and in a health maintenance program. In the demonstration courts/ delay is seen as a disease to treat and prevent from recurring. But the demonstration courts also treat delay as a symptom of underlying problems: procedures that are failing, poor communication between court and lawyers or between prose cution and defense, goals that have become pro forma. The demonstration courts have management controls that routinely take their own tempera ture. In Detroit, for example, the temperature is taken regularly with finely calibrated instruments. In Fairfax, a hand-on-the-forehead technique sufficed in the past, but may not be enough today. But no matter how sophisticated the measuring devices, the demonstration courts evaluate symptoms of delay in the context of other factors. For example, courts that set out to "crash the docket" by disposing of old cases will find that their measures of average time to disposition will initially swing upward because a disproportionate number of "old" cases are disposed in a short time. Courts That Succeed vii Similarly, reorganization of a court to achieve long-range goals may trigger symptoms suggesting problems. Although the symptoms need to be watched, they are to be understood as unavoidable side effects of an overall health maintenance program. Both phenomena occured in Detroit courts at different periods. The temporary rises in the courts' temperature actually indicated improvements brought on by treatment. The view that delay is both a disease that requires specific treatment and a symptom of unhealthy conditions fits with two assumptions under lying the idea of demonstration courts. The first assumption is that courts engaged in monitoring time to disposition are regularly monitoring their performance, which is a prerequisite for good health over the long term. The second, a more speculative assumption, is that those courts that take the symptom of delay seriously are probably paying attention to their health in other areas as well. For that reason, the demonstration courts were also used in the NCSC's Trial Court Performance Standards Project as test sites to determine the feasibility and utility of concrete measures of performance. If courts perform well in relation to Expedition and Timeli ness-one of five major performance standard areas-it is assumed that they are also likely to perform well in the four other areas: Access to Justicei Equality, Fairness and IntegritYi Independence and AccountabilitYi and Public Trust a.nd Confidence.5 Close observation of the six demonstration courts suggests that they succeed at something more profound and important than moving cases to disposition quickly. The demonstration courts view delay as a disease that interferes with their ability to carry out their mission. This is implicit in this book's organizing framework, which focuses on ten "common ele ments of successful programs" and is explicit in Neubauer's view: timely disposition of cases results from an overall organizational health mainte nance program that can be mobilized when any of the court's missions and goals are threatened. Further, the explicit identification of "expedition and timeliness" as but one of

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