Those are among the reforms documented by an independent consultant appointed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to assess the judicial system's performance and monitor an overhaul begun after The Inquirer reported that the city courts were in deep disarray.
The consultants' 54-page study concludes that sweeping changes in court rules adopted in the 18 months since the newspaper's reporting have yielded gains large and small. The Inquirer obtained an advance copy of the study, which is to be officially released Monday.
"This shows you can turn around the Titanic," said Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, an architect of many changes enacted in response to the newspaper's stories.
"The goal was to take a system in crisis and change it dramatically," said Justice Seamus McCaffery, who joined Castille in pushing for reform. "Once we saw the stories, it was just fast and furious. It was pedal to the metal."
The early results, according to the report, show a system undergoing significant transformation:
Municipal Court judges in Philadelphia are holding more defendants for trial in the upper Common Pleas Court. The share of cases being held for trial rose from 49 percent in 2007 to 57 percent so far this year.
Cases dismissed or withdrawn with no ruling on their merits fell from 42 percent in 2007 to 29 percent this year.
The number of cases to go forward on the first court date is on the rise - 27 percent last year, up from 19 percent in 2009. This reverses a long pattern of judges' repeatedly postponing court hearings, a process that has discouraged witnesses and caused thousands of cases a year to collapse.
