Court Analysis Justice and Court Administration

Administration and management of courts is filled with challenges. Often depending upon the geographical context of the court, such challenges will include resource shortage, a perpetual docket of criminal cases and the broader complexity of providing civil order and justice to communities while balancing constitutional law and local ordinance. Moreover, the complexity of administering justice in and of itself plays a part in the difficulty of court management, with issues such as the deepening ethnic diversity of encountered populations and shifting ideas about victims' rights playing defining roles in the tasks before any given court. The discussion here on language interpretation services and the timeline in the evolution of victims' rights are offered within the context of court administration.

Language Interpretation Services:

It is often the case that courts will find themselves burdened with the task of wading through the details of officer-defendant confrontations in spite of the various obstacles to communication which may have contributed to an initial altercation. Officers are trained to control situations rather than to reason with them, and especially in cases where language barriers are a factor, it is simply more expedient to work toward immediate resolution and allow the courts to sort through the details in a formal proceeding. This is consistent with Robinson's (2002) claim that "American criminal justice now devotes a larger portion of its resources to its police and corrections than to its courts, providing more evidence that we are following a crime control model of criminal justice." (Robinson, xv)

It is for this reason that it is incumbent upon the courts to provide all participants in court proceedings with the necessary resource support to effectively navigate the details of an altercation or of events that otherwise led to an incident,...

According to the Missouri Courts (MC)(2010), all courts are recommended to employ interpreters approved by a federal certification program overseen by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) Consortium for Language Access in the Courts as implemented in 2000. This calls for the use of unbiased and fully qualified language interpreters. The availability of this resource is girded by legislative terms as well, which indicate that "by law, courts shall appoint a qualified foreign language interpreter in all legal proceedings in which a non-English speaking person is a party or a witness (Section 476.803.1, RSMo)." And in the event that such is necessary, the Missouri Courts continue, "advise the court directly when services are needed so that they have adequate time to schedule qualified service providers." (MC, p. 1) This denotes that it is incumbent upon those in need of an interpreter to make the proper arrangements to request the necessary support and, simultaneously, it is incumbent upon the court to provide the requesting individual with access to such personnel.
Victim's Rights:

In the past, the focus of criminal justice procedures had typically been on the punishment of criminal behavior. This meant that within the context of legal proceedings, the experience of the victim has often been secondary or relegated to non-consideration as the resources of jurisprudence are dedicated to finding the truth of the alleged perpetrator's guilt or innocence. And because the system proceeds from an innocent-until-proven-guilty disposition, it has historically been difficult to simultaneously maintain the objectivity required of the courts while attending to the needs, rights and sensitivities of the alleged victim. This would create a scenario in which the advocacy of victims' rights would emerge as a critical area of need where court management is concerned. It is thus that "in 2004, the movement to redraft…