With the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, courts across the country shifted urgently to remote, rather than in-person, operations. It amounted to an unprecedented large-scale experiment. As courts prepare for a post-pandemic future, we looked in depth at both the harms of remote justice and at which practices might be worth continuing, with the overall goal of promoting fairness and equity for people facing charges and crime victims alike, and decreasing the use of incarceration.
Using New York City as a case-in-point, and drawing on interviews with a range of court-based actors, the report makes ten principal recommendations relevant to courts across the country—everything from reinstituting in-person arraignments as soon as possible, to maintaining at least some forms of remote supervision, while addressing inequities related to access to technology.