150,000+ finalised matters in NSW criminal courts over 2016-17

A new report has provided insight into the NSW criminal justice system, telling an interesting story about the state’s judicial process and highlighting key figures and statistics.

Grace Ormsby • 17 September 2018 • The Bar

The NSW Parliamentary Research Service’s A statistical snapshot of crime and justice in New South Wales “collates recent statistical information on crime, policing, the criminal courts and corrections in New South Wales”.

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The aim of the report is to “provide an evidence base to inform public discussion and policy development”, and uses information from national and state-based resources to do so.

More than 155,000 finalised defendants had matters dealt with across NSW Higher, Local and Children’s Courts in the 2016-17 period, according to the report.

Of these defendants, 136,145 (or 86.9 per cent) were proven guilty, 6,637 were acquitted (4.2 per cent), and 5,269 (3.4 per cent) were transferred to another court level.

Over the same period, only 8,388 individuals (5.4 per cent) had charges withdrawn by prosecution.

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Bail refusals saw a notable jump, increasing by 38.67 per cent to 9,948 cases in 2017 as compared with 7,174 in 2013.

In the NSW Higher, Local and Children’s Courts, there has been an increase in the number and percentage of defendants sentenced to imprisonment, from 9,570 (8.9 per cent) in 2013 to 13,042 (10.2 per cent) in 2017.

A breakdown of numbers in the report also highlighted a 25.14 per cent increase in female finalised defendants over a four-year period from 2013, while the percentage increase of male finalised defendants also went up, but less significantly, at 15.11 per cent.

Over the same period, the number of Indigenous finalised defendants increased by 16.24 per cent, while the percentage increase of non-Indigenous finalised defendants was slightly lower at 15.29 per cent.

According to the Australia Bureau of Statistics, “a finalised defendant is a person or organisation for whom all charges in a case have been formally completed so that they cease to be an item of work”.

Margaret Bateman Wednesday, 26 September 2018

How many were self-represented?

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Anonymous Monday, 17 September 2018

No breakdown here of how many 'proven guilty' by juries and how many by judges sitting alone without benefit of jury. ''Proven guilty'' should be replaced perhaps with ''found guilty'' as many are victims of wrongful conviction as Innocence Project has proven. It may be that a greater number are found guilty by judges sitting alone, suggesting perhaps bias - rubbery figures?

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- Pete Wednesday, 26 September 2018
  
  If it is anything like Western Australia, the vast majority are people pleading guilty to minor offences, which really skews the numbers. For example, if I rewrote part of the article using WA's statistics for 2016/17, it would look like this:
  
  "More than 117,000 finalised defendants had matters dealt with across WA Higher, Local and Children’s Courts in the 2016-17 period. Of these defendants, 108,056 (or 92.2 per cent) were proven guilty, 886 were acquitted (0.8 per cent), and 2,354 (2 per cent) were transferred to another court level. Over the same period, only 4,586 individuals (3.9 per cent) had charges withdrawn by prosecution."
  
  These numbers are fairly similar to the NSW figures. But they are entirely meaningless!
  
  That is because, out of those 108,056 people who were proven guilty, only 907 were found guilty at trial. The rest plead guilty, with more than 28% posting in their guilty plea in the mail and not even showing up to court to be sentenced.
  
  Therefore, in WA, 907 were found guilty after trial and 886 were acquitted. That's almost a 50/50 result. Even if half of those convictions were wrongful, it would still be less than 1% of all people convicted. Of course, even a single wrongful conviction is terrible, but my point is that the statistics in the article have nothing to do with that issue.
  
  As for your concern about bias, the opposite seems to be true. In the Magistrates and Children's Courts, where there is no jury, the conviction rate at trial was 45.5%. In the Supreme and District Courts, where it is usually a jury trial, the conviction rate was 64.7%. So that shows a magistrate sitting alone is more likely to acquit a person than a jury.
  
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