The purpose of the workgroup is to update, innovate and improve the processing of cases in the General Sessions Court of Charleston County.
While there have been improvements in the case processing over the years, timeliness of case processing within the Court of General Sessions (GS) has been consistently challenging to impact. In South Carolina, the benchmark has been to have 80% of pending General Sessions cases at or below 365 days and few counties have met this standard. Then, the pandemic exacerbated the challenges. It limited in-person proceedings and jury trials, and case backlogs grew as more new cases came into the system than were disposed. If this trend continues, it can lead to growing backlogs and increased jail populations. Backlog more simply defined by the National Center for State Courts is the term used to describe the number of cases that are older than the time standard set by the court. A few examples of backlog impacts include overloaded workloads, not enough time to focus on serious cases, increased lengths of pretrial detention, increased time for people to miss court and/or be rearrested while awaiting court, and longer waits for justice to be served impacting victims, defendants, witnesses and the community-at-large.