Williams and two justices of the high court want to transform Municipal Court, the court at the heart of the breakdown of the Philadelphia criminal justice system. They say it is out of step with every other county in Pennsylvania.
They are pushing for change in response to an Inquirer series that depicted a Philadelphia court system in crisis, plagued by low conviction rates and the dismissal of thousands of cases each year.
The series showed that when city criminal cases collapse, they largely do so in Municipal Court. Of all violent-crime cases that die, The Inquirer found, 82 percent fall apart in this lower court. The court system's own statistical reports, reflecting 60,000 cases of violent and property crime, also show the Municipal Court breakdown.
A key reason cases fail is that Philadelphia judges have allowed preliminary hearings to evolve into complex proceedings with often lengthy testimony. This permits defense lawyers to dig deeply into the prosecution's evidence and to move to dismiss a case if a victim or a police officer fails to appear.
"That's not the purpose of a preliminary hearing," said state Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery, a former administrative judge of Philadelphia Municipal Court. "It's strictly prima facie evidence - the lowest rung on the evidentiary ladder."
In other words, the standard should simply be whether a defendant is more likely than not to have committed the crime.
McCaffery, Williams, and the state's chief justice, Ronald D. Castille, propose streamlining these crucial early hearings, clearing the way for cases to move more quickly toward a decision on the merits.
