Scottish Justice System: Ensuring justice isn’t delayed
Helping the Scottish Justice System stay on track.
“Preventable court no-shows are not acceptable in a modern justice system that is fair, accessible and efficient.” Kenny MacAskill, Justice Secretary.
The old legal maxim states that 'justice delayed is justice denied'. The Justice Systems IT Solutions (JSITS) group helps to prevent delayed justice in Scotland, by driving efficiency improvements across the criminal justice community. Much of its work is to encourage and enable better communication and better methods of sharing information.
Across Scotland, there are 106 Sherriff Courts, 15 prisons, as well as the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), which is the sole prosecutor in Scotland – every criminal case is assessed and prosecuted by Fiscals. All of the different justice entities need to be linked up with data sources, to ensure that Fiscals can see when someone due in court is being held in custody. The Fiscals then arrange for defendants to appear.
Users of the Scottish Justice System are already familiar with a joined-up IT system, as the Fiscals only accept evidence and send prosecution details to defendants’ legal teams electronically – a system that we helped to introduce, which saves time and money on paperwork.
Michael Jackson, Scottish Criminal Justice IT Coordination Manager, has said, “We’re an intelligent customer. But we’re not technical implementers. We needed a partner who understood what we do and how we do it, to provide a thoughtful solution to the problem.” Which is why we have been the Scottish Government’s IT integration partner since 2005.
We were asked to produce a technical concept that could create what JSITS called the Court Door Listing service (named after the days when court lists were literally nailed to court doors).
Next, acting as technical advisors, we provided a technical specification and an evaluation of a shortlist of platforms on which Court Door Listing could be based. Finally, we wrote the software to be used on the platform creating an integration hub bringing together the Scottish Prison Service, the Scottish Courts Service (SCS) and COPFS.
This extracts court lists from the courts’ system’s central servers and checks them against prison lists extracted from the prison system’s servers. From this cross-referencing, e-mails are automatically generated and sent to Fiscal offices for when they arrive at work each day.
A Success Story
Bridget Campbell, Director of Justice at the Scottish Government, says, “Court Door Listing is a perfect example of what joined-up government should be about. It’s technology with a purpose, one that not only saves money – with an excellent return on investment – but also takes pressure off people and helps to deliver timely justice.”
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