Grass roots justice in middle america: The "county courts" in Kansas

The "lower" courts of our judicial system dispense justice to misdemeanant adults, handle practically all juvenile cases, decide whether or not felony charges should go to trial, and set bail.Because relatively little is known about how these courts operate, questionnaires were sent to the judges who preside over these courts in Kansas and to the felony court judges who receive cases from these lower courts.Most of the courts provide lawyers when they are requested to do so, but the variations from court to court suggests that the rights to a lawyer, reasonable bail, a speedy trial, and preliminary hearings are being ignored in some courts.The training of the judges, time spent on each case, types of dispositions, and the use of probation also vary extensively from court to court.High levels of legal training and the specialization that can come from court consolidation are not necessarily desirable, however.Measures of the judges' "orientations" indicate that the judges may more readily be classified as "active" or "passive" than classified as punitive or therapeutic. I. Studying the Purposes and Place of "County Courts" in the Administration of Criminal Justice.Everybody knows that we in America have a multi-tiered court system for the administration of justice.The great majority of legal and scholarly efforts have been devoted to the operation of the courts for felony offenders.The vast majority of criminal cases, however, are heard in the lower courts, courts called by many names but all handling non-felony offenders.Puttkammer's (1953) description of the administration of criminal justice devotes one paragraph to the "summary" trials of misdemeanants in these courts and the rest of the chapter on the magistrate (Ch.V.) to the remaining functions of these courts-preliminary examination of felons and setting and approving bail.Even the preliminary hearing function which Puttkammer considered relatively important (as do Sutherland and Cressey, 1974:419-420) is omitted in practice a third of the time.Nagel found that Of the 1,168 state cases coming from counties that have provisions for preliminary hearings and on which information was available, the accused received no public hearing in 434.In 357 of these he waived his right to a preliminary hearing-KJS, XI, 1 15 Spring 1975