Under the Judicial Resources Report recommendations from the State Court Administrative Office the Wayne County circuit court is slated to lose one judge no later than January 1, 2013. Wayne County executive Bob Ficano thinks that's not enough. In an op-ed piece in the Detroit News Ficano says that population loss in Wayne County justifies a greater reduction. Perhaps Ficano should take a closer look at what the Judicial Resources Report says about the formula used to make the recommendations, which explains why he's wrong:
The weighted caseload formula is the preliminary quantitative method to identify a potential judicial need or excess in each court. In the formula, a weight for each case type accounts for varying amounts of judicial time required to handle an individual case. The case weight for a medical malpractice case, for example, is much greater than the case weight for a civil infraction. All case weights include postjudgment time. The case weights are applied to the average annual new case filings and the judicial proportion to generate an estimate of the total judicial time necessary to process the court’s caseload. Judicial proportions reflect the percentage of the case weight workload that was handled by a judge, on average, as opposed to a referee, magistrate, or other quasi-judicial officer. The judicial proportions vary by court type and stratum. ... This calculation is divided by the judicial year, which is the average amount of time available to an individual judge each year for case-related activity. The result is an estimate of the number of judges required to process the court’s caseload.
The weighted caseload formula distinguishes the varying degrees of effort involved in handling different case types at the trial court level, and is far more accurate than an analysis based on unweighted total case filings. The proportions of different case types may vary significantly between different court types and between different courts. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) recommends a weighted caseload methodology above all other methods, such as a simple population analysis or an unweighted case filings analysis. In Michigan, the weighted caseload method has been used by the SCAO since 1998. (emphasis added)
It's hard not to prefer recommendations based on a nationally-respected formula using objective, measurable criteria, rather than simply on what we might wish were true.
Photo: Archway of the Penobscot Building, housing the 3rd Circuit Friend of the Court operations.
