Efficiency, Timeliness, and Quality: A New Perspective from Nine State Criminal Trial Courts

Justice System Journal, 2005 by Wasby, Stephen L

Brian J. Ostrom and Roger A. Hanson, Efficiency, Timeliness, and Quality: A New Perspective from Nine State Criminal Trial Courts. Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 1999. 202 pp.

In a study that uses and contributes to the notion of "local legal culture," Ostrom and Hanson sought to explore the relationship between timeliness and quality of case processing. For the former, they used the time taken to resolve cases, measured as the number of days from indictment or bindover to final resolution, and the latter, drawn from Trial Court Performance Standard 3.3 (Equality, Fairness, Integrity), is basically the amount of attention paid to a case. They examined 400 sampled cases from 1994 from each of nine criminal trial court systems in moderately large cities of varying sizes-Albuquerque; Birmingham, Alabama; Cincinnati; Oakland, California; and Portland, Oregon, as well as Austin, Grand Rapids, Hackensack, and Sacramento-and looked both at individual court systems and at 3,500 individual cases. They also wanted to know whether caseload characteristics, management strategies, and resources affected the timeliness-quality relationship, and, as perceptions are at the heart of "local legal culture," both prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys were interviewed for their perceptions, particularly of appropriate case-processing time.

Criminal cases, Ostrom and Hanson found, many of which were drug related, were similar across jurisdictions; most were resolved by guilty pleas, so trials were rare. Most importantly, a strong relationship between timeliness and quality was found; the authors observe that "timeliness in felony case processing occurs in contexts that also are conducive to the achievement of case process quality" (p. xi). While systems vary in the speed with which they treat all cases, all systems treat more complex cases more thoroughly relative to other cases. That is, in all courts, the more complex, serious, and difficult cases take more time, but "in the more expeditious courts," which are characterized by more efficient work orientations among both prosecutors and defense attorneys, "the work gets done within tighter time frames" (p. xi). While prosecutors and defense attorneys are adversarial to the same extent in all courts, there are differences between more and less expeditious courts in "views toward resources, management, and the competency of their opponents" (p. xii); in the more expeditious courts, attorneys see their opponents as more competent and attorneys are less likely to see resource shortages despite caseloads comparable to those in other courts.

The monograph contains an Abstract and Executive Summary; a basic text of 113 pages; a brief discussion of the research methods used; and more than 40 pages of overviews of the individual research sites. SLW