Memorandum  Memorandum regarding revised Standards on the Complaint Procedure

Date:	09/10/2008
Organization:	District Court

To: District Court Judges, Clerk-Magistrates and Chief Probation Officers 

From: Hon. Lynda M. Connolly, Chief Justice

Memorandum

I am very pleased to distribute to you the attached copy of the revised District Court Standards of Judicial Practice, The Complaint Procedure, to be effective October 1, 2008.

The original Complaint Standards were developed in 1975 and have served us well in this important (and long largely-undocumented) area of criminal practice. Since 1975, as the appellate courts have increasingly examined the complaint issuance process, they have been informed by and often cited the Complaint Standards in their decisions. In recent times accumulating appellate decisions and statutory and rules amendments have brought about many changes in law and practice and necessitated a complete revision of the Complaint Standards. 

I commend the revised standards to the careful review of all our clerk-magistrates, assistant clerks and clerk’s office personnel. It will also be very helpful for judges to be familiar with them, since judges have an important role in rehearings and in subsequent challenges to a magistrate’s probable cause finding. 

I am grateful to the Committee on Criminal Proceedings for undertaking this revision, and to the Advisory Committee of Clerk-Magistrates for their suggestions on an early draft. Thanks are also due to the many other clerk-magistrates and assistant clerks who offered comments on the revised standards in draft form. 

In FY 2008, more than 85,000 show cause hearings were conducted by District Court magistrates and more than 233,000 criminal complaints issued. It is my hope that the revised Complaint Standards will be even more helpful to magistrates and judges in this significant area of District Court jurisdiction.