32.
the scale of criminal cases in which the use of the resources for pre-trial reviews is less productive than simply using them to try the case. But in all cases the principle of the Chief Justice's Practice Direction should be clearly understood by everyone having business at court and it should be recognised that the judge will wish to know at or before the beginning of the trial, from the advocates, what steps they or their instructing solicitors have taken to limit the evidence and argument to the true justiciable issues and to give an accurate forecast of length."
What it all comes to is that everyone has the duty actively
to work towards proper readiness when the trial begins and everyone can
be asked by the judge to say at that moment if not before what he or
she has and has not done towards readiness.
33.
A vital part of preparation is the process of predicting how
long a case will take. The more this is done in concert the better it
will be.
In a
34.
survey in the District Court between 21st August and
20th September 1986 it was discovered that 22 cases unexpectedly
collapsed. The predicted time in the aggregate was 136 days or 530
hours; the actual time was 83 hours 42 minutes and therefore the
discrepancy was 591 hours 18 minutes. Of the 82 cases in 22 there was
in 32 an adjournment and 7
a plea of guilty, in 21 a settlement,
collapsed for other reasons.
35.
In a similar survey in the High Court between 21st September and 20th October 1986 23 cases collapsed unexpectedly. The predicted
time was 77 days and the actual time 11 days. In two cases there were
pleas of guilty, 19 settled, one was adjourned and one defendant did
not surrender to his bail. In another survey during the period 21st October to 30th November 1996 24 collapsed cases were forecast to take 118 days and in fact took nine.
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