The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Next to the police, the lower criminal courts play the most important role in forming citizen impressions of the American system of criminal justice. Even excluding traffic offenses, each year several millions of people are drawn into contact with these courts as defendants, complainants, or witnesses. Moreover , an appearance in court may have reverberations that affect a person's spouse, family, friends, and employer. In systems operating with a two-tiered criminal court system, roughly divided by misdemeanor and felony jurisdiction, about 90 to 95 percent of all cases are handled in these lower courts. Armed robbery, rape, and homicide are rare exceptions in comparison with the overwhelming number of petty offenses which swamp the lower courts. The pressures of coping with this large number of petty cases shape court practices and in turn affect the ways in which more serious cases are handled. Different levels of courts have distinct pathologies. The seriousness of the offense (and consequently the possible severity of outcome) affects the ways court officials approach their work. When a suspect is likely to be sent to jail for several years, his case is handled with far greater care than is a case likely to result in a small fine. Unless they are carefully bounded by reference to seriousness of charges, generalizations about how criminal courts operate can be grossly misleading. Even within the same court, what is routine for one type of case may not be for another. In this study, my observations focus primarily on the lower court in New Haven, Connecticut, the Court of Common Pleas xxvii INTRODUCTION as it is now called. It has sentencing jurisdiction over misdemeanors and lesser felonies. The generalizations I hazard about the flow of criminal cases and the nature of court organization which stem from this examination of a single court are usually restricted to lower courts or to the handling of "little" cases. As I emphasize in this study, the pathologies of criminal courts vary widely, largely in accordance with the magnitude of the "stakes" involved. /, recurring and continuous phenomenon in lower courts may not occur at all in higher courts that handle "bigger" cases. Although this book focuses on a single court in a single city, it is by no means an analysis of a unique institution or an institution in a unique setting, nor does it focus on features of the institution and its setting that are unique or even particularly distinctive. Most students of the criminal process agree that the operations of the criminal courts are shaped by little-understood factors, and that decisions are made as a consequence of an uncharted, complex, and interdependent set of relationships. Both of these factors militate against a comparative approach which by definition must impose at the outset a developed framework on the research. While there have been a number of studies comparing outcomes in several court settings, by and large these have been superficial reports which did not convince even their authors that they adequately controlled for major relevant factors. In contrast, the best of the recent comparative analyses of criminal courts have examined the more structured felony courts and focused on only two and three jurisdictions. But even their authors took pains to point out the limitations of their comparisons. So far as I know, there are no published fuIllength comparative studies of lower criminal courts. Comparative analysis implies a deductive research strategy, elaborating on a typology, testing hypotheses, or applying a theory. At a minimum, it requires advance knowledge of relevant factors, for it must impose requirements on the data collection so that the data will be truly comparable and the variables xxviii INTRODUCTION operationalized in equivalent fashion. I am not convinced that current knowledge of criminal court processes is well developed, and unless or until there is a substantial body of carefully drawn descriptive and inductive research on which typologies can be drawn and until classifications are made, the benefits of an analysis of a single setting may be as great as, if not greater than, those of comparative studies.1 This is not to suggest that this study and case studies generally do not have any devices to focus inquiry or to guard against preoccupation with the idiosyncratic. The best of them do; they rely on a test of substance and theoretical interest. Does the analysis focus on a substantial problem? Is the inquiry cast in general, theoretically intriguing...