During FY 2014, The Commissioners Court directed The Information Technology Department and the County Auditors Office to create a Judicial Management Report to assist the Criminal County Courts and Criminal District Courts in gauging the efficiency and effectiveness of their operational processes. The Judicial Management Report incorporates elements of the "Courtools" model designed by the National Center for State Courts, as well as work that has been done in other Texas counties to measure court system statistics and costs. The report captures key management operational effectiveness and cost statistics.
This report focuses on the following six measures and shows how the individual courts performed relative to each other and against a court-wide average.
Individual Measures
Access and Fairness
Definition: Ratings of court users on the court's accessibility and its treatment of customers in terms of fairness, equality, and respect.
Definition: The percentage of cases disposed or otherwise resolved within established time frames. This is a comparison of data from age of disposed cases and only considers cases that are disposed, not the full docket.
The Criminal District Courts have implemented a Felony Case Plan (CASE) that sets the time standards for El Paso County. The applied time frame for this measure will use the Standard Track time frame, in which a case can be disposed of between 275 days and 285 days. The most similar range in the reported data is between 181 and 365 days, which will be used for this measure.
Definition: The percentage of files that can be retrieved within established time standards, and that meet established standards for completeness and accuracy of contents.
Definition: Ratings by defendants/ respondents of their treatment by the court in cases in which the court has imposed a legal financial obligation (LFO).
Definition: Ratings by judicial officers, court administrators, and court staff on the importance of practices used by the court to determine, monitor, and enforce compliance by defendants with legal financial obligations (LFOs).
Definition: Juror Yield is the number of citizens selected for jury service who are qualified and available to serve, expressed as a percentage of the total number of prospective jurors summoned. Juror Utilization is the rate at which qualified and available jurors are used at least once in trial or voir dire, expressed as a percentage of the total number of qualified and available jurors (yield).
