Arquitectura y características de SAP R/3

The earlier analyses focused on the time from the date/s of the alleged offence/s to the date on which a report was made to the police. The following analyses focus on the time matters take to be finalised within the criminal justice system from first appearance in the Local Court to determination, or from committal to finalisation in the higher courts. The amount of time from the date of the offence to the date on which all related charges are finalised is made up of a series of time periods before and after reporting to the police. The main overall measure, however, is the

0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00 Pro po rtio n of p ers on s w ith p ro ve n o ff en ce

Sexual assault Indecent assault Act of indecency Linear (Sexual assault) Linear (Indecent assault)

115 interval between the date of the offence and the date on which it was finalised. This is the best available overall measure of delay in the court data across both the Local Court and higher courts.85

Ideally it would be useful to examine the time from report to police to arrest, from arrest and charging to first appearance, and from first appearance to determination. However, the court data do not include information on the date of reporting or the date of arrest.86 _{It would also have been}

useful to be able to compare the court process for reports initially made to the police when the victim/complainant was a child with those made during adulthood; however, the court data do not provide any information on the age of the child at the time of the offence and at report so this is not possible. There is also no systematic data collection for tracking the time that cases take to proceed through all parts of the court system.

Time between offence and finalisation

The time between the offence and court finalisation is shown in Figure 39. Most matters, across all years in both the Children’s Court (84.8 per cent) and the Local Court (72.7 per cent) were finalised within two years of the date of the offence. The median period between the date of the offence and finalisation in the Local Court was 11 months, and the mean was 38.4 months (SD = 75.4) Matters heard in the higher courts had markedly longer periods between the offence and finalisation than those in the lower courts. Only one-third (33.6 per cent) were finalised within two years of the offence and 40.8 per cent were finalised five or more years after the offence; 15.4 per cent were clearly historical matters, finalised 20 years or more after the offence. The median period was 40 months, and the mean was 101.4 months or more than eight years (SD = 123.7 months), similar figures to those reported by Hazlitt et al. (2004) for child sexual assault matters sentenced in the District Court in the period 2000–02 (median of 4.9 years and mean of 9.6 years).

85 _{If there was more than one offence, the earliest date was selected.}

116 Figure 39. Percentage of defendants by interval between offence and finalisation by court in New South Wales

Note: The period for the higher courts is for 2002–14 because offence dates are not available in the dataset for the higher courts before 2002.

Figures 40a and 40b show the interval between the offence and court finalisation by year of finalisation for both the higher courts and Local Court. In the Local Court, most cases were finalised within two years of the offence (purple and blue bars) but the proportion of short finalisations (within a year) fell substantially from the 1990s – from 65.2 per cent in 1994 to 23.6 per cent in 2004 – before rising to 66 per cent in 2014. Few matters are finalised in the Local Court beyond five years of the offence and that has been consistent over the period 1994–2014. The pattern is very different in the higher courts, where a substantial proportion of matters over the period are finalised at least five years after the date of the (earliest) offence. The highest proportion were finalised within two to five years.

0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0%

< 1 year 1–2 years 2–5 years 5–10 years 10–20 years 20 + years

Perc en ta ge o f cas es

Interval between offence and finalisation Higher courts Local Court Children's Court

117 Figures 40a and 40b. Interval between date of offence and finalisation by year of finalisation by (a) higher courts and (b) Local Court in New South Wales

118 Within this overall period, there are several time measures for the higher courts, Local Court and Children’s Court. An unknown proportion of the time from offence to committal (for higher court matters) or first appearance (for lower court matters) is a result of the delay between the offence and the report to the police, which is beyond the control of the criminal justice system. However, once the matter reaches court, there are significant time periods before finalisation, as Table 8 shows.

Table 8. Intervals between offence and stages at court

Higher courts (Earliest) offence to committal Committal to finalisation

Median 28 months 8 months

Mean 91.1 months 9.9 months

Range 19–655 months 2–378 months

From earliest offence to finalisation

Median = 40 months Mean = 101.5 months

Local Court Offence to first appearance First appearance to

finalisation

Median 5 months 5 months

Mean 42.0 months 5.8 months

Range 19-65 months 0–685 months 0–95 months

From earliest offence to finalisation

Median = 12 months Mean = 48.2 months

As Table 8 shows, the interval between the earliest offence and committal in the higher courts is considerably longer than the interval between the offence date and the first appearance in the Local Court. This probably reflects both the greater number of historical matters in the higher courts and the longer time to report more serious offences, and the longer delays in getting to the District Court. Once in the court process, the time from committal to finalisation in the higher courts (mean is 9.9 months) is longer than the time from first appearance to finalisation in the Local Court (mean is 5.8 months); it is also commensurate with the average time between committal and finalisation reported by Weatherburn and Fitzgerald (2015).

119 Another measure available for the Local Court and Children’s Court is the number of adjournments before the matter is finalised. In both courts, few cases have no or only one adjournment – only 15.7 per cent in the Local Court and 8.8 per cent in the Children’s Court. The median number of adjournments in the Local Court was 4 (mean = 4.4) and in the Children’s Court 5 (mean = 5.4). These figures indicate that delay and adjournments are a common feature of the criminal justice system once a matter proceeds and adds to the uncertainty of the process for the victim/complainant.

What then is the association between delay (as measured by the time between the earliest offence and finalisation) and the probability of a conviction in the different courts? And what other factors predict the likelihood of a conviction?