Court no-shows need consequences, reports on Philadelphia system say

The Philadelphia criminal-justice system should crack down on fugitives who duck court by jailing them in newly freed-up city prison cells and trying others in absentia, according to a pair of reports commissioned by the state Supreme Court.

"One of the key reasons for Philadelphia's high failure-to-appear rate is that there are few meaningful consequences for defendants who fail to appear," said one report, describing the current system as breeding "a culture of disrespect."

In a companion analysis, experts with the Pretrial Justice Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, interviewed nearly two dozen top justice officials in Philadelphia about the courts' bail and fugitive issues.

The institute said the city courts must impose "meaningful, swift, and certain" punishment on those who skip court and default on bail.

The courts, which took over administration of the bail system 40 years ago, are owed $1 billion in unpaid and forfeited bail.

Cracking down was vigorously endorsed by Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, a former Philadelphia district attorney, and Justice Seamus McCaffery, a former administrative judge in Philadelphia.

"There have to be some consequences for failing to show up," Castille said last week. "Lock them up for five days and see how they feel."

Said McCaffery: "We need to put some teeth back into the system so if people do not show up, absent a reasonable excuse, they'll be put in jail."

In early 2010, the two justices set in motion the review of the fugitive tally and other legal issues in response to an Inquirer series on the city's criminal-justice system.

This has already led to stepped-up efforts to collect bail owed by defendants - the amount collected went from $40,000 to $1.6 million, still a small share of the total.

One part of the Inquirer series, headlined, "Violent Criminals Flout Broken Bail System," reported that Philadelphia faced a fugitive crisis.

The article reported that a staggering 47,000 defendants were loose on Philadelphia warrants for skipping hearings and trials, and that Philadelphia was tied with New Jersey's Essex County, home of Newark, for the nation's worst fugitive rate.

Drawing upon its own analysis of court statistics, the newspaper reported that a third of all defendants in Philadelphia skipped one or more court hearings.