Continuances in the Cook County Criminal Courts

Many judges and lawyers whose suggestions we solicited in the early days of this project responded with some perplexity: Continuances? They're not interesting, so why study them? We explained that we were concerned with continuances (postponements of a court action to a subsequent date) not as a legal phenomenon, but rather with their impact on the system of criminal justice. We wanted to investigate the complaints of some observers that the volume of continuances in the Cook County criminal courts is excessively high; that defendants use continuances to defeat or delay prosecution; and that more stringent control of continuances on the part of the courts would yield both an increase in convictions and a reduction of costs in terms of police, witness, and court time. At this point, some of our judges and attorneys agreed that continuances might be worth studying. Others insisted that we were on the wrong track. There aren't all that many continuances, and most of them are necessary, they said. Anyway, continuances are a nuisance, but it's nonsense to pretend that they handcuff the police or infringe anyone's constitutional rights, so why worry? These contrasting views on the part of those closest to the court system confirmed our suspicion that an empirical investigation of the role of continuances in the Cook County criminal courts might be of some utility, if only to determine whether there is indeed a problem.