Dallas County Screening and Charging Time

Could just one change at the District Attorney's Office:

Support more crime victims?
Reduce prosecutors' caseloads?
Decrease pretrial detention?
Save taxpayers' money?
Help system-impacted children and families?

We're going to find out.

In partnership with The Chrest Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Lab, the Deason Center and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office are launching a groundbreaking research study. The results radically improve how our criminal legal system handles violent crime arrests and prosecutions.

Why study prosecutorial screening decisions?

Prosecutors are the gatekeepers of the criminal legal system. Their decisions drive the criminal process. 

After police make an arrest or issue a citation, prosecutors “screen” each case. If the evidence is strong, and a conviction would be in the public interest, prosecutors will file charges, formally moving an arrested person into the next step of the criminal process. But if an arrest is too weak to pursue, or the evidence points toward a wrongful accusation, prosecutors will decline the case, freeing the arrested person from any related detention or bail conditions.

Each day of delay in this screening process means that:

Innocent people languish in jail

Prosecutors’ caseloads remain unnecessarily high

Taxpayers’ resources go to waste

Understanding the Screening Process

Screening is a prosecutor’s preliminary post-arrest review of a new case. At this early stage, if the evidence is weak, a conviction is not in the public interest, or the defendant is not blame-worthy, a prosecutor can reject the case and decline prosecution. Ideally this screening should occur on “Day One,” within 24 hours of an arrest.  

Rapid screening weeds out bad or weak cases at the earliest post-arrest opportunity. Prompt case declination frees arrested people from unnecessary detention, saving jobs and reuniting families. With rapid screening, prosecutors can also save taxpayers’ money and conserve scarce judicial resources.

When a prosecutor declines a case, they remove it from the criminal legal system. An arrested person must be freed from any jail or relieved of any bail conditions associated with that case.

Once a prosecutor accepts a new case, they must decide which charges to pursue.  If supported by the evidence, the prosecutor may choose different charges than those suggested by the police.  The prosecutor must then formalize these charges, launching the criminal court process. 

If a prosecutor wants to review more evidence before declining or accepting a case, they can “return” a case to police for further investigation. If law enforcement acquires the requested information, they can resubmit the case for prosecutorial review. 

To make early screening decisions, prosecutors review police reports and evidence, as well as a report of the defendant’s criminal history. Some cases also require prosecutors to review additional evidence. For example, allegations of drug possession may require prosecutors to review laboratory reports about the suspected contraband. In assault cases, a prosecutor may need to listen to a 911 call, view police photos, and review notes about the office’s contact with the victim. Ideally, defense counsel will also provide important information about the arrested person, such as their personal background or their willingness to seek counseling or treatment. 

In a horizontal prosecution, one prosecutor performs case intake, and another resolves the case by plea or trial. In a vertical prosecution, the same prosecutor handles the case from intake to disposition.

Prosecutors determine whether a case continues through the system when they decline or accept prosecution.

Project Details

This project will test whether early victim outreach can improve the quality and timing of charging decisions in assault cases in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office (“DAO”). In Phase 1 of this project, the Deason Center gathered statistical data and embedded a researcher in the DAO’s intake unit to observe, in real-time, the office's prosecutorial workflow for screening and charging cases. In Phase 2, the Center will embed victim outreach specialists in the intake process. These outreach specialists will be randomly assigned to provide victims with resources and prosecutors with case assessments.  In Phase 3, the Deason Center will report whether the early use of victim outreach specialists in assault cases:

  1. Increases services to crime victims
  2. Improves the quality and timing of screening decisions
  3. Decreases pretrial detention of people whose cases are declined
  4. Changes the rate at which charged cases end in dismissal
  5. Evenly distributes any changes across defendants of different races and ethnicities
Deason Center researchers have investigated the screening and charging process in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office (DAO). Statistical researchers collected data from the DAO’s TechShare case management system data, examining 270,905 charging decisions made over more than four-and-a-half years.  The team then calculated the time that elapsed between the office’s receipt of a new case and the office’s decision about whether to accept or decline prosecution. See our findings about time-to-decision. 

Additionally, to understand the DAO’s work processes, an embedded researcher spent over 70 hours observing how prosecutors and administrative staff handle new cases. The research team interviewed intake attorneys and administered an anonymous attorney survey to them.   

Equipped with this information, the researchers met with the District Attorney and his case intake team. Together, the Deason Center and the Dallas County DAO designed a randomized controlled trial to test whether early victim outreach could improve the quality and timing of intake decisions. 
In Phase 2, the Deason Center and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office will launch a randomized controlled trial to study how early victim outreach impacts the screening process. Learn more about Phase 2 here.

How Does the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office Conduct Case Intake?

In Texas, the processes through which prosecutors decline, return, or accept and charge new cases are commonly known as case intake procedures, or simply, intake.

Three groups of prosecutors conduct case intake at the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors assigned to the Intake/Grand Jury Division make screening and charging decisions for most cases. Two specialized crime divisions—Division 3 and Division 4—conduct intake on white-collar crimes, elder abuse, sexual assaults, and crimes against children.  

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office practices both systems. For most cases, the office uses horizontal prosecution. However, in specialized crime units, the office often uses vertical prosecution, allowing the same attorney to handle a case from intake through disposition.

Submission:

Case intake begins when law enforcement submits a case to the District Attorney’s Office. Because the DAO uses electronic case processing tools, police submit new cases by uploading their reports and evidence into the TechShare case management system. TechShare sorts the new cases into electronic queues based on specific offense characteristics. For example, cases that involve family violence are sorted into a general assault queue, while controlled substance cases are sorted into a different queue.

Quality Control:

Legal secretaries in the DAO’s Quality Control Unit review each new case. First, they verify that the case submission materials are correctly labeled and that any attached documents can be opened. They compare the parties’ biographic and demographic data across case management platforms making corrections as necessary. Finally, they add case “tags” that reflect specific case characteristics, such as "intimate” for intimate partner assault cases or “translator” for cases that require an interpreter.  Later, the office will use these searchable tags to direct case workflow and generate requests for victim advocate services. Once a case passes the quality control review, staff submit it to prosecutors for intake.

Intake:

Intake prosecutors are assigned to specific intake queues. Using the TechShare system, they review their designated intake queues and assign themselves to review new cases. For each new case, a prosecutor reviews the police report, any accompanying evidence, the defendant’s criminal history, and any additional information provided by defense counsel, victim advocates, or pretrial services.

If the evidence is too weak, a prosecution is not in the public interest, or the defendant’s conduct is not sufficiently blameworthy, the prosecutor will “screen the case out,” and rejecting it in TechShare. If the prosecutor needs more evidence, they will use TechShare to “return” a case to law enforcement with a request for additional information.

The DAO’s innovative quality control review maximizes prosecutorial resources. Instead of spending their time reviewing incomplete cases or correcting case data, intake prosecutors devote their time to substantive case decisions.

Additionally, in the Dallas County DAO’s horizontal prosecution system, an elite unit of veteran prosecutors makes almost all of the office’s intake decisions. Their significant trial experience and deep familiarity with criminal court procedures equip these lawyers to make judicious decisions about which cases to prosecute.

The Dallas County District Attorney's Office uses a dedicated intake unit to accept or decline cases.

Phase 2 Details

In Phase 2, the Deason Center and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office will launch a randomized controlled trial to study how early victim outreach impacts the assault case screening process.  

The Center will place two victim outreach specialists in the Dallas County DAO. As directed by the Deason Center research team, quality control staff will randomly "tag" some assault cases for victim services.

Victim outreach specialists will work on these cases. In addition to providing victims with support, the specialists will document whether each contacted victim is available, credible, and willing to testify.  Intake prosecutors will review these victim contact notes as they decide whether to accept or decline the case. 

The Center’s hypothesis is that earlier victim contact will:

  • Improve the quality and timing of assault screening decisions
  • Decrease time-in-detention for declined assault cases
  • Increase conviction rates for accepted assault cases 

In assault cases, victim advocates provide critical support to complainants and prosecutors. Advocates provide victims with access to essential resources, such as counseling, housing assistance, and financial aid. They help complainants understand the status of their cases, offering insight and guidance about the criminal legal process. Often, they explain when and how to attend court proceedings. Sometimes, they even accompany victims to court.

At the intake stage, victim advocates provide prosecutors with information that can improve the quality and speed of their intake decisions. Advocates undertake the time-consuming work of making the DAO’s first contact with a complainant. They inform prosecutors whether a complainant can be located and, if so, whether they want to pursue the case. VAs also provide qualitative assessments of a complainant’s cooperativeness and credibility. Armed with this information, intake prosecutors can make timely and well-informed decisions about accepting or declining prosecution.

Without early contact from advocates, victims may be unaware of the available services and resources. They may wait weeks, or months to hear from the trial lawyers who are prosecuting their cases. If the office declines to prosecute, a victim may never hear from the DAO at all.

Prosecutors are also deeply disadvantaged. Intake prosecutors must decide whether to prosecute or decline a case without knowing whether they can locate a complainant—much less whether they will be a cooperative and credible witness. By the time trial prosecutors begin to work on these assault case, some victims may have become discouraged about the criminal justice system or lost interest in prosecuting. Others may have moved or changed phone numbers without updating the police. And no matter how likely a conviction might have seemed at intake, a successful assault prosecution is difficult—if not impossible—without a cooperative and credible victim. Meanwhile, some defendants who will never be convicted linger unnecessarily in Dallas’ overcrowded criminal justice system because prosecutors are unaware whether a complainant is missing, uncooperative, or unreliable.

A randomized controlled trial is a rigorous scientific experiment that attempts to measure how an “intervention” or change impacts certain identified outcomes of interest. In this project, the intervention is early contact between the DAO and an assault victim. The outcomes of interest are the quality and timing of assault case screening decisions. Victim outreach specialists will be randomly assigned to some cases in the assault intake queue and not to others. This randomization, across different victim types and assault case categories, allows researchers to measure the intervention’s effect regardless of other case characteristics, such as victim race, victim ethnicity, crime location, or assault type.

Using a predetermined randomization scheme, the quality control unit will “tag” some assault cases for services and assign a victim outreach specialist to the electronic case file. The victim specialist will attempt to contact the complainant(s) in each tagged case and to provide them with victim resources and support. They will also make a preliminary assessment of whether a complainant is available, credible, and willing to testify. Victim outreach notes will be documented in TechShare and prosecutors will review them during the intake process.

Current funding constraints mean that most assault victims already wait weeks—or even months—before they hear from anyone at the DAO. Those whose cases are declined for prosecution may never hear from the DAO at all. Victims who are not assigned an outreach specialist as part of this intervention will not be treated any differently than they would have without this experiment. Ultimately, the Deason Center’s intervention will provide more victim advocate services than are currently available to assault complainants in Dallas County.

You can stay up to date by signing up for email alerts. Click here to sign up.

Our Experts

Pamela Metzger

Executive Director
Contact

Malia Brink

Senior Policy Attorney
Contact

Dr. Andrew Davies

Research Director
Contact

Dr. Victoria Smiegocki

Assistant Research Director
Contact