THE Supreme Court’s program aimed at expediting the resolution of cases was found effective when it was pilot-tested in Quezon City in 2013 and in the other courts in Metro Manila where it is also being implemented.
“This one-time case decongestion program launched in 2013 has so far recorded a 30-percent reduction rate of caseload for Quezon City,” Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno says in her annual Judiciary report on the “Hustisyeah! project.”
She says the project was piloted in 33 courts in Quezon City with help from five lawyers, 24 law graduates and 53 law students.
She says data from the Office of the Court Administrator as of February 2016 shows that the pending cases in 119 courts in the cities of Makati, Angeles, Davao, Manila, Pasig, San Juan and Taguig were also reduced by 17.21 percent or from 95,025 to 78,670.
“Since its inception in 2013, the Hustisyeah! case decongestion program of the Supreme Court has significantly reduced the dockets of the 175 heavily congested courts participating in the program,” Sereno says.
The program involves three activity phases: the inventory of court dockets to weed out dormant cases, the formulation of case decongestion plans to speed up the processing of the remaining cases, and the implementation of the decongestion plans.
Sereno says another project that is also helping the courts speed up the resolution of cases is the continuous trial system that is now being implemented in 52 pilot regional trial courts in Quezon City, Manila and Makati.
Under this system, the courts handling criminal cases will try cases such as bouncing checks, cases involving minors, drugs, estafa, illegal recruitment and select commercial cases continuously until resolved.
The high court has said it is confident that, with the system, the trial time of cases will be reduced to 90 days from three to five years.
Sereno says the continuous trial system has shown that roughly 70 percent of the pilot courts were able to conduct arraignment or pre-trial within 30 days under the Rules of Criminal Procedure, effectively shortening trial time.
The performance data on the length of the trial itself will be submitted in October.