Timely justice: How case screening improves efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness

Evidence from a randomized controlled trial

By Justice Innovation Lab Staff

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Updated September 23, 2026

Introduction

This report details findings from the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) of prosecutor office structure. Evidence from the study shows that promptly reviewing lower-severity cases reduces case processing times, moves more cases out of the prosecution pipeline within the first 60 days of arrest, and reduces the number of convictions. Over a 24-month period, two part-time screening attorneys ("screeners") reviewed 3,815 cases (2,942 defendants), 71.5% of the caseload for the South Carolina Ninth Circuit Solicitor's Office (SOL9) in Charleston County. The screeners directly disposed of 276 cases from the SOL9 docket, affecting 269 defendants. This shift in process is a procedural justice improvement as quicker case resolutions reduce undue pressures on defendants and burdens across the justice system.

Further, defendants assigned to screening were no more likely to be rearrested within 12 months of arrest than those with cases that were not assigned to screening.

Key results

2 weeks

faster resolution for cases assigned to screening

−3.4 percentage points

fewer convictions for cases assigned to screening

+6.6 percentage points

more early dismissals/remands for cases assigned to screening

5,456 people

involved in the study

Why this matters

Prosecutors affect thousands of lives daily, yet there is limited evidence to guide leaders of prosecutors' offices on how to assign cases to maximize efficiency while ensuring cases are decided as effectively and fairly as possible.

This study of office organization arose from a process to identify inefficiencies in Charleston County.

Ultimately, the development and evaluation of SOL9’s case screening process was the result of extensive collaboration, including workshops involving line prosecutors, management, and impacted community members. Such an approach is employed in other fields, like education and healthcare, as well as in certain areas of criminal justice such as policing, but it has been severely lacking in prosecution.

What we know (and don't know) about prosecution

Despite the crucial role of prosecutors in the justice system, there is no research comparing the effectiveness of vertical prosecution (where one prosecutor handles a case from start to finish) with horizontal prosecution (where different prosecutors handle various stages of a case).

Most existing research focuses only on how specialized units handle serious crimes like murder or sexual assault—cases that involve extensive evidence and coordination with victims, witnesses, and law enforcement.

However, murders and other serious cases represent just a small fraction of the prosecutor's workload. Most cases in America's criminal justice systems are misdemeanors (minor offenses), and even among felonies, non-violent crimes such as drug possession and property offenses make up the majority of caseloads.

For the lower-severity, high-volume cases that make up much of prosecutors’ everyday work, we have limited evidence regarding which approach best balances fairness, efficiency, public safety, and the interests of victims.

Assessing that balance is difficult because conviction rate is the outcome most prosecutors’ offices measure,

and conviction rates, like other conventional metrics, do not provide information on whether a given decision is effective or fair. Prosecutors contend with competing priorities between the highest-priority, often-complex cases and the more frequent, lower-severity cases. This tension can lead to lower-severity cases languishing, taking months to resolve, even when the defendant is jailed. These delays, which affect the entire system, are a consequence of how cases are managed.

The prosecution process

After police arrest someone, prosecutors must decide whether and how to charge the case based on two main questions:

Is there enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?
If the evidence is sufficient, do the facts of the case and the person's criminal history support an alternative to prosecution—diversion, specialty court, or a reduced plea offer?

For complex cases, these questions require careful consideration. For other cases, like shoplifting or drug possession, the legal and factual questions are more straightforward. The simpler cases, those requiring only an incident report and criminal history, are the focus of this screening study.

Why delays and the status quo hurt everyone

When cases take too long to resolve, the consequences are serious. Though "speedy trial" rules exist to protect defendants, these protections are often waived, sometimes without people fully understanding the consequences. This leads to extended periods where people may be held in jail before their case is resolved. Research shows that people held in jail before trial (pretrial detention) have worse outcomes and are more likely to plead guilty—even when innocent. We return to this idea in the Fairness section, where we discuss how processing delays can lead to over-conviction.

Delayed justice also leads to more court hearings. Each hearing can pull a defendant away from job and family responsibilities, while exacerbating caseload strains by reducing the court time available for handling more serious matters.

Even without delays, prosecution can harm the community. For example, a recent study suggests that prosecuting minor offenses may increase the likelihood that people will commit future crimes relative to those whose cases are dismissed.

Similarly, for lower-risk defendants, longer pretrial detention is associated with a greater likelihood of new criminal activity, both before trial and after case disposition.

Findings

This section presents key results from the case screening RCT, highlighting its impact on efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness within the criminal justice system. We also discuss further implications of case screening, focusing on benefits and potential drawbacks.

Our analyses are generally limited to looking at outcomes one year from an event, such as arrest, since that is the period for which we have complete data for the randomized cases. The cases analyzed in this report are those presented to the Ninth Circuit Solicitor's Office from May 2023–April 2025.

Efficiency

Total state prosecutorial personnel (prosecutors, investigators, victim advocates, support staff, etc.) in the United States increased by just 5% from 2005 to 2020,

while growing demands on prosecutors and the backlog of cases caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have placed significant strain on the system. Case screening is one policy response that can address these challenges while still prioritizing fairness and public safety.

Improving case processing efficiency through screening benefits everyone involved in a case. Lower-severity cases are handled faster, freeing up capacity for the cases that pose the greatest risk to public safety. Screening also results in fewer hearings, saving time for prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants, witnesses, victims, law enforcement, and courts. For defendants, earlier removal from the system means less disruption to jobs, housing, and family and social networks—minimizing long-term harms and leaving them better positioned to avoid further justice system involvement.

Results from our study indicate that cases assigned to screening (the treatment group) were resolved faster than comparable cases that went through the standard prosecution process (the control group). Because there are no mandated standards for case resolution times,

we focus on how quickly cases leave the system, specifically on early exits from SOL9 prosecution through dismissals and remands. Figure 1 presents disposition rates within 60 days for cases assigned to screening (RCT screened) and the control group (RCT control); cases assigned to screening were more likely to be dismissed or remanded within the time period.

Figure 1. Percentage of cases disposed, dismissed, and remanded within 60 days for RCT screened and unscreened control groups.

There is a statistically significant difference

in the pace of case resolution. Assignment to screening reduced the average time from arrest to disposition by roughly two weeks (about 14 days over the first year), with the gap opening sharply in the first months after arrest before narrowing over a longer period (Figure 2). Faster case resolution eases the burden a pending case places on prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, defendants, and victims.

Figure 2. Estimated probability that a case was closed by each day in the year after arrest.

The reduction in time-to-disposition reflects increases in both the speed of screener dismissals and remands, and the number of dismissals and remands for cases assigned to screening.

Assignment to screening raised the probability of a dismissal or remand within 60 days of arrest to 8.1%, from a control rate of just 1.5%. Both dismissals and remands increased: dismissals rose by 4.3 percentage points and remands by 2.3 percentage points. Because the baseline rate of early dismissals and remands is so low, the proportional changes are large, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Probability of dismissal or remand within 60 days of arrest for RCT screened and unscreened control groups.

If cases assigned to screening resolve faster, we would expect fewer court hearings per case (e.g., continuances).

Indeed, we find a statistically significant decrease in court hearings for disposed screened cases (2.8 hearings) compared to unscreened control cases (2.9 hearings).

While this may seem like a minor difference, it translates to a savings of 260 hearings over the 2,603 screened cases resolved within one year. Each court hearing involves several criminal justice actors (prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, clerks, etc.), so even a small reduction in the number of hearings adds up to meaningful resource savings across the system.

Despite improved time-to-disposition, we do not find a noticeable or statistically significant decrease in the case backlog in Charleston County. This is likely due to the fact that while screeners disposed of hundreds of cases, the benefit is spread across many line prosecutors and the overall backlog is thousands of cases.

As prosecutor caseloads grow, improving efficiency is of great importance. The case screening program helps to quickly remove weak cases from the system, allowing prosecutors and the courts to devote more resources to higher-priority cases.

Effectiveness

From a prosecutor’s perspective, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of any individual case decision. There is no way to observe what would have happened had a different choice been made, and prosecutors may not always agree on how the same case should be handled. Given the documented harms of incarceration and system involvement, any policy change that reduces either without compromising public safety is promising—especially if the change is cost-neutral or cost-saving. Case screening is one such intervention where low-severity cases are quickly filtered out of the system without an apparent rise in rearrest.

To assess the impact of case screening on public safety, we compare rearrest rates within 12 months of arrest for treatment and control groups. We calculate rearrest rates based on the first date of arrest for a defendant, so a defendant cannot appear twice in the calculation regardless of how many times they are arrested. We use the first date of arrest since many defendants are released before case disposition and may reoffend at any point following release. This is a more conservative approach than measuring rearrest from the case disposition date, though we report disposition-based rates as well. At 12 months post-arrest, individuals in both groups were rearrested at similar rates, as shown in Figure 4. This indicates that although screened cases are closed faster, screened individuals do not reoffend at significantly higher rates.

Figure 4. Rate of rearrest within 12 months of arrest for RCT screened and unscreened control groups.

Rearrests were overwhelmingly for low-level offenses (property, drug, or traffic charges)—83.5% of control cases and 82.8% of treatment cases—with no rearrests for murder or attempted murder, and no significant difference in charge severity between groups.

Overall, we do not find evidence that screening increases recidivism. It is possible that differences will only emerge with a longer follow-up period, and future work will investigate this possibility.

Fairness

Given the power of the state when arresting someone, and the disruption that arrest and conviction have on one's life, it is important for the state to exercise its power fairly. By screening cases, SOL9 addressed an issue that appeared patently unfair—drawing out cases against individuals that were likely to be dismissed, in part because overworked prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges may not have time to quickly address certain low-level cases. As outlined above, screening provides significant benefits in resolving cases more quickly without increasing system involvement for the defendant. Delays in case resolution harm both victims and defendants. As one formerly prosecuted individual reflected, having a pending case for any amount of time places "anxiety that not only is the person going through, but the family of the person."

That harm is most acute for people held in jail while their case is pending, compared to those who can afford bail and are released. In South Carolina, after an individual is arrested, they appear before a magistrate judge for a bail hearing; individuals unable to afford bail and not granted release will continue to be held in the county jail. Resolving low-level cases as early as possible limits how long defendants remain in detention, helping them avoid some of the negative collateral consequences associated with incarceration. Evidence suggests that pretrial detention can also make defendants more likely to plead guilty, even when they are innocent. Therefore, the pressure to plead is alleviated by earlier case review and removal of cases without sufficient evidence.

We measure two outcomes to examine the impact of screening on fairness: changes in guilty pleas, and differences in punishment (pre-disposition incarceration, post-disposition incarceration, and probation).

Regarding changes in guilty pleas, we cannot know which specific people would have pleaded guilty if their cases had not been screened. But because cases were assigned at random, we can estimate the effect by comparing guilty-plea rates in cases assigned to screening with rates in similar cases assigned to standard prosecution. Using that approach, we estimate that assignment to screening reduced the probability of pleading guilty within one year by 3.4 percentage points, resulting in roughly 117 fewer low-severity guilty pleas. Notably, the difference in guilty pleas arises after the case has been opened for 200 days, which indicates that screening did more than move up dismissals and remands that would have happened anyway: it also kept some borderline cases from ever reaching a guilty plea. For those individuals, screening helped avoid convictions that can affect employment, housing, family, and future court outcomes, and reduced the pull of the process itself—the pressure to plead guilty simply because a case remains open.

In terms of punishment, individuals whose cases were assigned to screening experienced, on average, fewer days of pretrial detention, incarceration following case disposition, and probation, compared to the control group (Figure 5). Though the differences are not statistically significant, all punishment measures are lower for screened cases, and the overall pattern is consistent with the idea that screening reduces the burden of system involvement.

Figure 5. Detention and probation days for RCT screened and unscreened control groups.

Implications

The effects of case screening go beyond whether a case is ultimately prosecuted. Below, we describe the benefits these findings suggest in terms of resource allocation, and identify potential drawbacks that could emerge as screening continues or expands.

Benefits of screening

Case screening leads to resource savings throughout the criminal legal system. Earlier case review can reduce staff burdens for courts, prosecution and defense offices, jails, and arresting agencies, in addition to reducing burdens on defendants and victims.

Some of these effects are measured directly in our analysis, while others point toward longer-term benefits that are harder to capture within the study period. This RCT was conducted in a medium-sized jurisdiction, which is important because many prosecutor offices around the country look more like Charleston than like the larger urban systems where criminal justice research is often conducted. But a medium-sized study also has limits: outcomes such as jail days, incarceration, employment, and later criminal activity can be difficult to estimate precisely. Below, we distinguish clearly between results where we have strong, statistically significant evidence and results where our estimates are less certain.

The clearest evidence is that screening helped resolve more cases earlier. Screened cases were more likely to be dismissed or remanded within 60 days, and they resolved faster on average, meaning fewer cases continued through repeated hearings, attorney preparation, and court scheduling. For people whose low-level cases are dismissed or remanded, earlier resolution can reduce missed work, family disruption, transportation costs, and the stress of having an open criminal case. For attorneys and courts, screening can also free time and attention for more serious cases that remain in the prosecution pipeline.

Screening also reduced guilty pleas. The control group had more low-severity convictions, consistent with research showing that case delays increase conviction rates. Fewer guilty pleas mean fewer convictions, which matters even if a defendant would not have been sentenced to prison. A sentence involving probation can impose real costs on someone as they attend meetings with probation officers and have other obligations. A conviction can make it harder to find work, secure housing, obtain licenses, and avoid future involvement with the justice system.

This is especially important for people who would otherwise receive their first conviction. Screening may therefore create benefits that do not immediately show up in jail and court budgets, but still matter for individuals, families, and communities.

The pretrial detention results are more nuanced. Screening increased early dismissals and remands, and reduced guilty pleas, but these changes do not necessarily result in large reductions in average incarceration. Many borderline cases may have been dismissed or remanded even without screening; those that did end in conviction would generally have involved little pretrial detention, and short—if any—prison sentences.

To get a clearer picture of other impacts of case screening on custody, we looked beyond average pretrial detention time—which can be skewed by cases with atypically long detention—and assessed the probability that someone would be held in pretrial detention at different lengths of time. We found that screened cases were less likely to result in pretrial detention, particularly between 30 and 75 days, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Probability of pretrial detention for at least the number of days shown.

Our results provide evidence that case screening is beneficial in many ways: cases resolve faster, there are fewer convictions, and there appears to be a reduction in the number of people in pretrial detention for 30 to 75 days. But the real payoff may go beyond these metrics. If avoiding a low-level conviction helps people stay employed, housed, and less likely to come back into the system, the long-term benefits could end up bigger than anything this study can capture in the initial follow-up window. Our ongoing research is designed to test those longer-term effects.

Potential drawbacks

As with any policy change, there may be drawbacks that did not emerge during the experimental period, or that we are unable to measure directly. We detail these potential drawbacks below and, where possible, intend to monitor them and report findings in future work.

SOL9 employed two experienced prosecutors as screening attorneys, both of whom had previously worked in the office—one with more than 30 years of experience and the other with more than 4. We observed differences in how often the screeners dismissed, remanded, or recommended full prosecution. Further research is warranted to evaluate the importance of prosecutorial experience, and office-specific experience, in shaping prosecution decisions.
Line prosecutors may become reliant upon screening, or incorrectly assume that screening removes all cases that should not be prosecuted. This may lead line prosecutors to spend valuable time trying to prosecute every case the screener does not dismiss or remand, even when some of those cases still shouldn’t proceed. Screening attorneys are not able to remove every such case, since they may not have all the information needed to make a decision at the time of screening.
Criminal justice agencies do not share equally in the benefits and costs from screening. While SOL9 may benefit from rapid removal of cases, the Sheriff’s Office (in running the jail), the Court (with fewer hearings), and the public defender’s office (with fewer plea bargains to negotiate) may benefit more. Since the Solicitor’s Office bears the entire cost of employing the screening attorneys, this imbalance could cause budgetary challenges without county-wide budgetary reallocation.

Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit Solicitor's Office took a careful, considered approach to changing its case intake process to address increasing caseloads and time-to-disposition. Because cases were randomly assigned to screening or standard prosecution, this study offers some of the strongest available evidence on how a change in intake process affects case outcomes. After 24 months of measurement and 12 additional months of data collection, the rigorous design produced clear and convincing evidence that screening low-level cases reduces case disposition time, in part through rapid dismissal or remand, and reduces the number of guilty pleas, so defendants face fewer collateral consequences.

There is suggestive evidence that defendants assigned to screening spent less time in pretrial detention and were sentenced to less prison and probation time, but our sample is not large enough to identify if these differences are statistically significant. There is no indication that public safety was affected, with no statistically significant difference in rearrest rates within 12 months of arrest. Across a variety of metrics, screening demonstrates that low-risk cases can quickly be removed from the felony docket, in a manner that greatly reduces negative impacts on defendants. Furthermore, this intervention requires few resources. Two part-time screening attorneys reviewed 71.5% of the office’s incoming low-level cases for Charleston County, showing that dedicated intake review can be added with minimal additional staff while producing an outsized effect. SOL9’s redesign of its internal case processing demonstrates how a data-informed, systems-thinking approach can lead to effective policy making.

Appendix

As a robustness check to our rearrest calculations, we calculate monthly calls for service and arrests in Charleston County from 2022 to 2024 based on publicly available data. As shown in the graph below, though the average number of monthly calls increased in 2024 compared to 2022 and 2023, the difference is not statistically significant for either year.

Figure A1. Average monthly calls for service, 2022-2024

In the case of arrests, there is a statistically significant increase in the monthly number of arrests starting for 2024 and 2025 compared to 2022 and 2023. The increase in arrests is not of individuals who passed through screening and is not indicative of a rise in violent or more serious property crime in Charleston.

Figure A2. Average monthly arrests, 2022-2025

In examining what crimes are driving the increase in arrests, we find that they are non-violent offenses, many of which are not prosecuted by the Ninth Circuit. These arrests are not connected to screening, as the rearrest rates described above do not indicate an increase in crime whereby screened individuals are being rearrested at significant rates. Below are the top five charges with the greatest increase in arrests from 2023 to 2024. The increase in arrests for these minor offenses may represent a change in enforcement strategy by police, but does not suggest a rise in serious crime.

Figure A3. Charges with the greatest increase in arrests from 2023 to 2024.

Figure A4. Charges with the greatest increase in arrests from 2024 to 2025.