Friday, August 31, 2012

Thumbs Down To Night Shift?

It seems that the defence lawyer community is about as keen on evening and weekend courts as most magistrates and court staff.
Magistrates' Courts routinely sit on Saturdays and bank holidays, usually to deal with people in custody, whose cases must be dealt with as quickly as practicable. On occasion benches are also called in on a Sunday, and there is always a duty clerk who has a list of names of JPs who can be called out of the pub or away from the lawnmower or the ironing board if an urgent case arises.
What seems to have happened is that some in authority have become excessively excited by the extraordinary efforts made during last year's riots, and drawn the entirely wrong conclusion that this is a way forward for the future. The money men's eyes are starting to gleam at the possibility of 'sweating the assets' by making the costly court estate work for more than the current five or so hours per day. Unfortunately, the number of available staff is finite and extending their hours would also be costly. The defence lawyers' case is in the link cited above. We are in daily contact with the first-class rumour network that pervades the London justice system and a number of us have it on excellent authority that senior magistrates and court staff are underwhelmed by the whole idea, partly because of the personal implications, but mostly because of the practical objections.
The Blair-era experiment with night courts was a multi million pound disaster. Prisons do not receive outside of usual hours, and they are blessed with, shall we say, occasionally inflexible unions. Probation are not available, hence no pre-sentence reports. The swift disposal that politicians yearn for can be instantly thwarted if the defendant pleads not guilty. Even if he puts his hands up, if the case attracts a higher penalty than a fine, an adjournment is unavoidable.
So we advise the MoJ managers not to be too optimistic. The flexible hours experiment is already sickly, and may be a dead duck not too far into the New Year. Here's a Report from the Telegraph

17 comments:

  1. If the objective is simply to save money I'm not sure how this is likely to be achieved since, presumably, there is already the correct number of paid staff for the case load and additional staff or hours would be required possibly with financial premiums for antisocial working hours. Getting more out of the capital assets can only be be possible by the other highly emotive issue of merging and closing courts.

    However, I think the idea of weekend or evening courts is not totally without merit. Not because I am interested in the convenience of accused attending courts, as in many cases it will make little difference, but rather because it might widen the range of people able to make the not insignificant time commitment to join the lay judiciary. That would surely be good for Justice.

    It is surely possible to split caseloads so that only offences which would be unlikely to attract (or may even not be able to attract) a custodial sentence are called outside of the hours the ancillary services are functioning. Although if we believe that such a matter is good for justice, or the efficiency of justice I don't know why those ancillary services are being allowed to dictate the terms of operation of the courts.

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  2. Bystander(s) hits the nail firmly on the head, although misses out the vast swathe of cost that clearly hasn't been thought about by those who dream up these schemes. Add to the prison problem, those of getting (paying) defence lawyers, court security, prisoner transport, ushers, legal advisors, DJs (probably unwilling and hugely expensive), probation, YOT, court admin, heating, electricity, greater turnover of computer equipment due to extra use .... I'm sure I could go on and do a proper cost study, something that the MoJ seems unable to do, but I'll offer my services (at a fee of course)

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  3. I thought that one of the lay magistracy's proudest boasts was that there is no such thing as a "senior magistrate" (unless such a notion is judged by the number of blog views, perhaps?).

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    1. Senior also means old, and may mean 'with a few judicial miles on the clock'.
      It isn't a rank.

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    2. A clapped out old banger, then?

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  4. The New York City Criminal Court, which deals chiefly with arraignments and bail hearings (generally at the same time), runs 365 days a year from 9 AM to 1 AM, two full shifts. And at that it is typically 24 hours between arrest and arraignment. Not running two shifts would cause arrests to pile up indefinitely. For that matter, just reading all indictments out loud (though it is a defendant's right to hear it) would clog the courts intolerably; indictments are normally provided in writing to the defense attorney.

    On the other hand, negotiations, evidentiary hearings, trials (of misdemeanors only, crimes carrying less than a year of jail time), and other court activities are conducted only during the day shift.

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  5. It is more than a little interesting that nowhere in the Team's post or, indeed, the Law Society article, the focus is on Magistrates, Court staff and Defence Lawyers. Aren't you going to need prosecutors and prosecution staff too?!

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  6. Apologies, that should have read nowhere is the focus on anything other than, etc...D'oh!

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    Replies
    1. It's always beneficial to avoid negative statements, including double negatives.

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    2. As the Americans say: 'Ain't got no'.

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  7. It might have been more productive if back in 2010 Ken Clarke had addressed a simple question; how do you speed up the system by reducing the number of available courtrooms?

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  8. It's this sort of trenchant analysis that makes people turn to Bystander and his team's blog. Glad to see that he's back on track.

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  9. There is a proposal to run Saturday Youth Courts. Being aimed, apparently, at accommodating those attending school full time, whose parents are in full time work, I am not sure what the take up would be.

    It remains to be seen whether there will be sufficient numbers of legal advisers, ushers, and other staff willing to volunteer to man the courts, and whether there has been additional budget provided to fund the trial.

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  10. According to Wikipedia Chris Grayling MP is 'the first non-lawyer as Lord Chancellor since 1558'.

    I wonder if he will have a more pragmatic take on things than Ken clarke?

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  11. The casualisation of the criminal justice is doing nothing to reinforce the fact that doing things wrong is bad.
    The ridiculous cost of opening all hours is totally disproportionate to the benefit and generally serves no useful purpose. Going to court should be an inconvienence, not just another appointment for those who have transgressed. For trials and witnesses surely proper,sensible listing is the answer. I can see an argument maybe for better use of the Saturday remand court but the overall benefits would be minimal.
    It would be much better to staff the CPS so that they had all they needed for normal business rather than this hair-brained scheme.
    BTW- this computers in court lark is another farce. The poor prosecuters cannot hold the computers because they are so heavy and the ones I have seen have had their head buried in it to be able to read things. What's more they can't accommodate more than one page of information at a time and if suddenly a question is asked about something else, rather than being able to flick to the appropriate page they have to labouriously scrole through the file.
    And ........the cost about £1,300 a pop aparently per computer!!!

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  12. Going to court should be an inconvienence, not just another appointment for those who have transgressed. For trials and witnesses surely proper,sensible listing is the answer.

    Are you saying you think it is possible to schedule trials that are inconvenient for "transgressors" (or people "innocent until proven guilty" as I like to call them), but apparently not inconvenient for witnesses and victims?

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  13. I see the points about cost but actually feel that this is something worth paying for. The amount of time it takes to bring cases to trial or even first hearing is a significant problem that, I believe, causes serious issues for he justice system. They've recently added afternoon bail dates in our area but we're still baling more Han a month in the future.

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Posts are pre-moderated. Please bear with us if this takes a little time, but the number of bores and obsessives was getting out of hand, as were the fake comments advertising rubbish.