{"id":4883,"date":"2023-08-11T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4883"},"modified":"2023-08-11T12:01:30","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T12:01:30","slug":"almost-1-3-of-milwaukee-felony-cases-are-dismissed-in-court-up-since-2016-part-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4883","title":{"rendered":"Almost 1\/3 of Milwaukee Felony Cases Are Dismissed in Court, Up Since 2016 [PART 6]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/milwaukee-felony-cases-dismissed\/<\/a><\/p>\n

PART SIX IN A 10-PART SERIES. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Milwaukee County\u2019s criminal justice system has broken down at almost all levels. Although some of this can be attributed to the pandemic, all of it can not. Local officials\u2019 questionable policy decisions and their failure to develop strategies to restore effectiveness also play a role, and it\u2019s imperiling public safety.
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

PROBLEM #6: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Once criminal cases hit court, defendants are more likely to have them dismissed than before the pandemic, and fewer cases are being resolved. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The number of criminal cases resolved in the court system plunged during the pandemic, but it has not fully rebounded. 12.6% fewer cases were resolved in 2022 than in 2019.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The percentage of criminal court cases DISMISSED has risen since before the pandemic. In 2022, dismissals for misdemeanor cases were 30.2%. That\u2019s up 9% since 2017 but down since 2021. Dismissals for felony cases rose to 27% in 2022, up 11% since 2016 but down slightly from 2021. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The misdemeanor dismissal increases started as a trend before the pandemic. <\/strong>There were fewer guilty pleas, a trend that also started before the pandemic. Officials attribute the dismissal issues to court backlogs resulting in witnesses not being found or defendants not being willing to enter guilty pleas, which we explore in a future article.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE SERIES:\u00a0 <\/strong>We have taken the lead in exploring the problems in Milwaukee County\u2019s Criminal Justice system, breaking stories on Milwaukee police staffing declines<\/a> (which started years ago), the DA\u2019s high non-prosecution rate and new reliance on summonses<\/a>, the ACLU Collins Agreement\u2019s deleterious effect on proactive policing<\/a>, new jail and police policies restricting bookings<\/a> and arrests, and the massive court backlogs<\/a>, which leave defendants on the streets longer to re-offend and which provoke constitutional concerns<\/a>. Milwaukee is at a crisis point, with record homicide numbers and a severe reckless driving crisis.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, a new August 2023 report<\/a> from the Wisconsin Policy Forum has examined Milwaukee County\u2019s Criminal Justice System in great detail, providing fresh data from 2018 (before the pandemic) to 2022. The quote and data in the opening section come from this report. We are excerpting some of the key statistical findings in a 10-part series to further understanding of the problem. You can\u2019t formulate solutions if you don\u2019t understand the problem\u2019s scope. The few news articles that emerged only superficially skimmed over the report\u2019s findings. <\/em><\/p>\n

Although the report deals with the context of the pandemic, it also makes it clear that, in many respects, trends imperiling public safety started before it or have continued, even escalating in some cases, in 2022, after its height. In other words, you can\u2019t blame everything on the pandemic. The report also indicates that, in a number of ways, problems that escalated during the pandemic have not been resolved by officials even as late as 2022.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In each article, which we will run over the next 10 days at 7 a.m. every day, we will outline the problems and present the research, keeping rhetoric out of the way. After that, we will run a wrap-up article suggesting solutions. What happens in the state\u2019s largest county has an effect throughout Wisconsin. The WPF report was commissioned by the Milwaukee-based Argosy Foundation and the Milwaukee Community Justice Council (CJC). In this series, we hope to get past simplistic rhetoric (\u201cit\u2019s the state Legislature\u2019s fault!\u201d or \u201cwho cares what happens in Milwaukee!\u201d) and focus on data.
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

PROBLEM #6<\/h2>\n

\"milwaukee<\/p>\n

Fewer criminal cases are being resolved in court, and cases are more likely to be dismissed than before the pandemic.<\/p>\n

    \n
  • \u201cThe number of cases that have been \u201cresolved in court dropped significantly during the pandemic, and have not yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. In each year from 2015 to 2019, at least 11,740 cases were resolved each year, and in no month were fewer than 700 cases resolved. Given the disruption that occurred early in the pandemic, it is not surprising that monthly case resolutions fell to just 99 in April 2020, but they did
    \nnot get back above 700 in a month until March 2021.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cIn each year since the start of the pandemic, the number of resolved cases has grown. In fact, in 2022, only 12.6% fewer cases were resolved than in 2019 (as compared to 30.0% fewer cases in 2021 and 49.7% fewer cases in 2020.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cThe proportion of misdemeanor cases that ended with a dismissal was rising noticeably prior to the pandemic and then continued to increase, from 21.7% in 2017 to 33.2% in 2021. Dismissals then fell slightly to 30.8% of resolved cases in 2022. It is also important to note that while misdemeanor dismissal rates were high at the very beginning of the pandemic \u2013 above 41% in April, May, and June 2020 \u2013 they returned to pre-pandemic levels quickly.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cMeanwhile, after staying consistently between 18% and 19% in each year from 2016 to 2019, dismissals for felony cases jumped significantly \u2013 to 23.3% in 2020 and again to 28.3% in 2021, then fell slightly to 27.0% in 2022.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cFor both misdemeanors and felonies, higher percentages of dismissals intuitively correspond with lower percentages of guilty pleas. From 2015 to 2019, the percentage of felony cases that ended with a guilty plea declined from 69.7% to 63.6%, before dropping further to 60.3% in 2020 and 59.8% in 2021. In 2022, for the first year in the available data, they increased (to 60.9%).\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/milwaukee-felony-cases-dismissed\/ PART SIX IN A 10-PART SERIES. Read parts 1,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":4885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wi-right-now"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883","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\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4887,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions\/4887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}