I spent 8.5 years of the last 10 years of my judgeship handling felony cases in the Criminal Division of the Rock Island County Circuit Court.
In the 18 years since, I have written only once about the business of my old court to show the difficulties facing the judge in a particular highly publicized case.
Two things have now moved me to write about the handling of criminal (felony) cases here in Rock Island County.
First, it seems that there are daily news accounts of shootings in our Illinois Quad-Cities.
Second, in visiting with people I trust, who spend a lot of time around the county criminaldivision, I have been told:
— It now takes a year to dispose of a case;
— The circuit court judges don’t want to be assigned to the criminal division;
— Nobody wants to try cases; they want to negotiate the cases instead.
Before writing this, I decided to verify what I had been told. I did so by checking the dispositions of cases filed in January of 2018, the first 97 cases filed in 2018.
From past experience (in checking dispositions of my own cases), I felt that checking all the cases filed in the first month of 2018 would given me a fair representative sampling.
Of the 97 cases filed in January 2018, here’s what I found:
1. One case is stayed until the defendant is restored to “fitness.”
2. 36 cases still were pending/undisposed of as of Dec. 20, 2018.
3. 10 were dismissed — without any other dispositions on other counts.
4. 14 cases utilized more lenient “alternative dispositions;” i.e., judgments were withheld, or where defendants were placed in an offender initiative program.
5. 36 cases ended with a plea of guilty to at least one count. Of those 36 cases, 14 ended with probation, 13 ended with conditional discharge (probation without a probation officer) and nine ended with a prison sentence.
As I studied the computer printout of the criminal cases filed in January 2018, certain facts stood out:
1. Not one of the 97 cases appears to have gone to jury trial or bench trial.
2. 36 out of 97 cases are still pending — nearly a full year after they were filed!
3. The 36 cases disposed of by pleas of guilty all appear to be the results of negotiated pleas.
So based on the foregoing, what concerns do I have based on my experiences?
Principle No. 1: If a judge starts the year with 100 cases on his docket, he wants to end the year with 100 or less cases on his docket. If 100 new cases are filed each month, the judge must dispose of 100 (new or old) cases each month.
If on Jan. 1, you have 100 cases on your docket, and 100 more are filed in January, if you dispose of only 64, on Feb. 1, you will have 136 cases on your docket.
If that pattern holds (you fail to dispose of 36 cases each month), by April 1, you will have 208 cases on your docket, and by year’s end you will have 532.
Principle No. 2: Getting an acceptable negotiated plea requires that judges and prosecutors be able and willing to take/force cases to trial. If the defendant makes bond, why would any defendant or his attorney care if the case ever gets to trial?
If defense counsel knows that the prosecutor is unable or unwilling to try his case, what incentive is there for the defendant ever to seriously negotiate or plead guilty?
Defendants plead when they know that the prosecutor is ready and willing to try the case, and the client may get hammered by the judge if the defendant is found guilty at trial. Without these two realities, why would any competent defense counsel ever plead his client guilty — unless the plea results in the prosecutor effectively “giving away his case?”
Principle 3: It is up to the judge to move the cases on his docket. Defense counsel has no incentive to force his defendant’s case to trial, unless his client is sitting in jail, and will spend more time in jail awaiting trial, than he is likely to get if he pleads guilty.
And if the prosecutor is allowing his own case load to increase by 36 a month, why is there any reason to believe that he will be sufficiently diligent to do the judge’s job as well as his own?
My next two op-eds will deal with the role of the judge in the disposition of cases.
Posted: QCOline.com January 3, 2019
Copyright 2019, John Donald O'Shea
If on Jan. 1, you have 100 cases on your docket, and 100 more are filed in January, if you dispose of only 64, on Feb. 1, you will have 136 cases on your docket.
If that pattern holds (you fail to dispose of 36 cases each month), by April 1, you will have 208 cases on your docket, and by year’s end you will have 532.
Principle No. 2: Getting an acceptable negotiated plea requires that judges and prosecutors be able and willing to take/force cases to trial. If the defendant makes bond, why would any defendant or his attorney care if the case ever gets to trial?
If defense counsel knows that the prosecutor is unable or unwilling to try his case, what incentive is there for the defendant ever to seriously negotiate or plead guilty?
Defendants plead when they know that the prosecutor is ready and willing to try the case, and the client may get hammered by the judge if the defendant is found guilty at trial. Without these two realities, why would any competent defense counsel ever plead his client guilty — unless the plea results in the prosecutor effectively “giving away his case?”
Principle 3: It is up to the judge to move the cases on his docket. Defense counsel has no incentive to force his defendant’s case to trial, unless his client is sitting in jail, and will spend more time in jail awaiting trial, than he is likely to get if he pleads guilty.
And if the prosecutor is allowing his own case load to increase by 36 a month, why is there any reason to believe that he will be sufficiently diligent to do the judge’s job as well as his own?
My next two op-eds will deal with the role of the judge in the disposition of cases.
Posted: QCOline.com January 3, 2019
Copyright 2019, John Donald O'Shea
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