{"title":"One judge to rule them all: Single-member courts as an answer to delays in criminal trials","authors":"Konstantinos Kalliris, Theodore Alysandratos","doi":"10.1111/jels.12341","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that single-member panels are as efficient as three-member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.</p>","PeriodicalId":47187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"233-268"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jels.12341","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Empirical Legal Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.12341","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard and the European Court of Human Rights. We use a novel dataset of 1463 drug trafficking cases tried between June 2012 and January 2014. As our measure of efficiency we use the time to issue a decision, and we find that single-member panels are as efficient as three-member ones. We take advantage of a feature of the reform to control for several confounding factors and support a causal interpretation of our findings. We complement our analysis with a survey of 142 judges to guide our interpretation of the results.