{"id":4086,"date":"2023-07-06T17:30:06","date_gmt":"2023-07-06T17:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4086"},"modified":"2023-07-06T18:03:45","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T18:03:45","slug":"celebrating-wisconsins-step-toward-swifter-criminal-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4086","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Wisconsin\u2019s step toward swifter criminal justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/celebrating-wisconsins-step-toward-swifter-criminal-justice\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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Almost a year ago the Badger Institute published my\u00a0research\u00a0exploring the severe delays and case backlogs<\/a> in Wisconsin\u2019s criminal justice system. Judges, prosecutors and defense\u00a0attorneys alike had been raising the alarm about these delays for years \u2014 even before the pandemic \u2014 but no one had sought to identify its causes with in-depth research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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We\u00a0discovered\u00a0that victims and defendants alike were being left without the speedy trial promised by our constitution and justice was becoming\u00a0more delayed<\/a>\u00a0each year. Cases for some of the most serious violent crimes like sexual assault and murder were taking more than a year to resolve.<\/p>\n

The cause? A failure to properly support prosecutors and public defenders who quickly leave for higher salaries and leave behind languishing cases that have to be picked up \u2014 after inevitable delays \u2014 by other underpaid colleagues. We specifically discovered that these attorneys were paid the lowest salaries among both their colleagues in many other states and other attorneys in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0provided\u00a0our leaders with six detailed recommendations<\/a> to fix the problem and\u00a0urged<\/a>\u00a0our leaders to take action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This week Governor Evers signed a budget<\/a> passed by the Legislature that includes a more than 30% starting pay raise for assistant district attorneys and assistant public defenders and more flexibility for merit-based pay raises for attorneys currently in those roles. This makes the compensation for these roles more competitive and should reduce the high rates of turnover currently existing in District Attorney and public defender offices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The budget also increased the hourly reimbursement paid to private attorneys who serve as defense attorneys in many cases by more than 40 percent going forward. We were not able to empirically explore this problem in our own report, but low reimbursement has also been\u00a0classified\u00a0<\/a>by many as another factor contributing to case delays. In fact,\u00a0recent litigation<\/a>\u00a0revealed that many cases are delayed for months or more merely because defense counsel could not be found in many jurisdictions across the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These important steps will help reverse the crisis of delayed justice \u2014 ensuring the system more effectively serves the needs of all Wisconsin residents. We hope that the Legislature will continue this important work next session by advancing the other recommendations in our\u00a0report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jeremiah Mosteller is an attorney and criminal justice policy expert and a Visiting Fellow at the Badger Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The post Celebrating Wisconsin\u2019s step toward swifter criminal justice<\/a> appeared first on Badger Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/celebrating-wisconsins-step-toward-swifter-criminal-justice\/ Almost a year ago the Badger Institute published my\u00a0research\u00a0exploring…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":4088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-badger-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4086"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4089,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4086\/revisions\/4089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}