Mediation program still worthy of shot
Hillsborough County Superior Court seems like a logical place for the state to launch a pilot mediation program aimed at reducing the amount of time it takes to resolve criminal cases.
It does, after all, handle 30 to 40 percent of the state’s caseload, and we imagine county officials would have put up a hue and cry for just that reason if they had been cut out of the program in favor of another county.
Instead, the state launched the program in the southern circuit that includes Nashua, but County Attorney Patricia LaFrance of Hollis is lamenting how unfair the system is to prosecutors, after only a handful of cases.
Court officials should pay close attention to the criticism.
“It’s turned into wbeating up on the state, ‘the state’s being unreasonable,’?” LaFrance told The Telegraph last week. “It’s never about the defendant stepping up and taking responsibility. It’s supposed to be back and forth, and it seems to be very one-sided.”
We don’t know if that’s reality or just perception, but when a program like this one fails to pass muster with a major constituent like the prosecutor’s office, it tells us that the court still has some work to do.
The idea behind the mediation is for a retired judge to give prosecutors and defendants an assessment of the merits of their respective cases in an informal setting to allow the two sides to reach a quicker agreement on the plea deal they’d probably arrive at eventually, since nine out of 10 cases never go to trial anyway.
It’s a good theory and it has worked in Arizona, but if it doesn’t have the confidence of both sides here, it’s hard to see how it can succeed.
Since it seems to be a dud in Hillsborough County, court officials are thinking about pulling out and trying it elsewhere in the state, where prosecutors might be more receptive to the idea.
We say, if court officials can’t make it work in one of the state’s busiest criminal venues, why take the show on the road.
A better idea, we think, is for court officials to take the criticism to heart, see how they might incorporate LaFrance’s perspective into the program and give it another try here, assuming the county attorney is still willing to make a good-faith effort to do so.