Call it March Madness, or a mass arraignment. Either way, it had the 15th Circuit Solicitor's Office buzzing Tuesday. March Madness is an effort to clear up in just one week a number of old cases that have been hanging around for more than a year.
For the second year, the solicitor's office has taken cases that have fallen through the cracks and brought them before a judge, with each defendant forced to make a decision right then and there. Take this deal or leave it.
There are hundreds of defendants and dozens of different charges, everything from Assault and Battery with Intent to Kill to Check Fraud.
In most cases, the defendants were offered a plea deal months ago. But in one way or another, they managed to push the process along without deciding whether to accept it.
So this week, the defendants are brought before a judge and told, either accept the plea deal right now or get ready to go to trial. The defendants are told in no uncertain terms, if you don't take the plea, you'll never get this same deal again. "Half are taking them, half are wanting to go to trial," said Ed Chrisco, Public Defender.
Crisco says the solicitor could avoid some of the chaos of March Madness by doing the same process three or four times a year instead of just once. But Deputy Solicitor Jimmy Richardson says the whole point is to clear out the backlog of old cases and to reach the point where they don't have to do it again... ever. "We're trying to clean out the jail and either move them to prison or move them out of the jail and back into society, one way or the other."
Last year, they cleared out about 1,500 cases in a week. This year, the deputy solicitor says they will consider it a great success if they get through a thousand cases.
The oldest case the court has handled so far this week is a drug possession case from 1990.
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