TRIAL COURT COMPLETES ROLLOUT OF MASSCOURTS
LITE;
Electronic Criminal Case Management System Enhances Public Safety
Chief
Justice for Administration and Management Robert A. Mulligan
today announced that the Trial Court has completed its
rollout of MassCOURTS Lite to 63 divisions of the District
and Boston Municipal Court Departments. MassCOURTS is the
Trial Court’s web-based, electronic case management
system. MassCOURTS Lite is the core of the system’s
criminal case management component, which improves public
safety through better information sharing and identity
of defendants in criminal cases and provides many cost
efficiencies in court operations.
The
rollout was accomplished in approximately one year with
the support and assistance of hundreds of Trial Court employees
across the Commonwealth who attended to their regular case
management responsibilities as they were adapting to the
new system.
Chief
Justice Mulligan said, “I am very proud of the effort
and hard work of those employees in the trenches and their
enthusiastic participation in the training in order to
make the rollout a success. Most remarkable is their willingness
to embrace cultural change and to modify entrenched business
practices to improve management through automation. Through
the capable leadership of Chief Information Officer Craig
Burlingame and Judge Jim McHugh, who has devoted countless
hours to this project as my special adviser, the Trial
Court has made substantial progress in the rollout of MassCOURTS.”
During
the past year, an average of one court division per week
was added to the MassCOURTS Lite system. The system contains
more than 2.4 million criminal cases, 129,000 of which
have been added since the rollout began. More than 5.5
million identities of defendants, including their aliases,
are in the system. Approximately 550 Trial Court employees
use MassCOURTS Lite to perform nearly 20,000 transactions
daily.
An
important public safety feature of MassCOURTS Lite is the
integration of State Police data which provides better
identity management in criminal cases. Each night, the
MassCOURTS Lite system automatically obtains State Identification
(SID) numbers assigned by the State Police to individuals
who have been arrested and fingerprinted. Each time it
successfully matches a SID number with MassCOURTS data,
MassCOURTS automatically adds the SID number to the system’s
identity information, greatly enhancing the reliability
and the accuracy of information Trial Court employees can
use in future cases. Hundreds of Trial Court employees
from the clerks’ and probation offices are collaborating
in a fundamentally new way to enhance defendant tracking.
Chief
A.Wayne Sampson, retired Executive Director of the Massachusetts
Chiefs of Police Association said, “The Trial Court
has been in regular communication with the association
and with our individual members to insure a smooth transition
to the new system, and to implement never before used standards
for criminal identity management within the Trial Court.
We appreciate the collaborative way this initiative has
been approached and look forward to the continued public
safety benefits this new application represents.”
Boston
Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said, “The Boston
Police Department applauds the efforts of the Trial Court
to incorporate biometric support to identity data in criminal
cases within MassCOURTS…We look forward to working
with the courts as these efforts continue and welcome the
resulting improvements to the entire criminal justice system.”
The
new system eliminates the labor and cost of mailing thousands
of printed notices by electronically delivering information
about appointment of counsel in criminal cases to the Committee
for Public Counsel Services (CPCS).
CPCS
Chief Counsel William J. Leahy said, “The breakthrough
that has been accomplished this year is impressive, and
we applaud the MassCOURTS team for its accomplishment.”
Other
cost saving features of MassCourts Lite include the creation
of centralized forms which are automatically filled in
with case information and instantly delivered over the
computerized network to printers in the location where
the form is needed.
District
Court Chief Justice Lynda M. Connolly and Boston Municipal
Court Chief Justice Charles R. Johnson said that MassCOURTS
Lite helps them to achieve goals derived from the recommendations
of the Monan Report that are aimed at reducing the time
litigation takes and the public and private cost litigation
entails.
Chief
Justice Connolly said, "The MassCOURTS Lite application
allows managers to 'drill down' into the data to identify
potential improvements in both case flow and case processing.
For the first time we have access to important information
to help us fashion streamlined procedures to close out
cases or to schedule next events."
Chief
Justice Johnson said, "The new web-based case management
system enables information sharing throughout the Trial
Court and its constituent agencies, and improves information
flow within the court system itself."
At
the same time that MassCOURTS Lite was being rolled out
in the District and Boston Municipal Court Departments,
the electronic document imaging component of the MassCOURTS
system was being installed in the Probate and Family Court
where it is now in use in every division. Today those courts
have electronic images of more than 113,000 cases and 912,000
electronic documents. Approximately 5,000 new documents
are added daily. The imaging system allows instant access
to documents, even if they are physically stored in remote
locations.
In 2005, the Land
Court Department was the first Trial Court department to "go live" with the full
web-based MassCOURTS system. The rollout of full MassCOURTS is now moving forward
with the other Trial Court Departments and is expected to be completed next year.
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