Courts around Australia face huge backlog of criminal cases, report finds
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Version 0 of 1. Courts across Australia are facing a growing backlog of criminal cases, with hundreds taking longer than a year to process. Nearly a quarter of pending cases in New South Wales’s supreme and district courts – other than appeals – are older than 12 months, according to a Productivity Commission report released on Tuesday. That compares to a rate of 18% in 2014-15, 19% in 2013-14 and 11% in 2012-13. As of June 30 last year, the state had 4,192 matters – 1,017 of which had not been completed inside a year. In Tasmania, almost 29% of criminal cases were older than 12 months, followed by South Australia (25.5%) and the ACT (23.1%). The national benchmark says no more than 10% of lodgements pending completion in supreme, federal, district, county, family and coroners’ courts should be more than 12 months old. Western Australia and the Northern Territory were the only ones within that benchmark last year. The report noted that most cases in the NSW supreme court were murder and manslaughter cases, so statistics could not be directly compared. Similarly, it said that the jump in cases exceeding 24 months in Victoria’s supreme court (from one in 2014-15 to 12 last year) related to a number of complex, related cases involving foreign bribery allegations. Meanwhile, the commission’s report into Australia’s corrective services found an overall drop in the per-day cost of prisoners. Nationally, $210 per prisoner per day was spent in 2015-16, compared with $229 in 2011-12. NSW spent the least at $166.94, while Tasmania spent the most at $311.87. Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory all recorded a rise in net expenditure on prisoners compared with 2011. |