Arizona Attorney - March 2014

conducted.9Pursuant to Criminal Rule 17. 4(a), alleged victims are advised of any plea, they may be present for the conference (in our experience they rarely attend), and judicial officers do not conduct settlement conferences in their own cases unless the parties stipulate to it. Even if the parties permit the assigned trial judge to do the settlement conference, many judicial officers still permit either party to request a new judicial officer to conduct the trial (although it can be argued that if you permit the trial judge to do the settlement conference you are agreeing to that judicial officer to do the trial). This issue should be resolved by the court and the parties before the conference is conducted.

Under the Rule either party may request the conference, or the judicial officer assigned the case may set it on her own. As a practical matter the attorneys have conferred in advance and ask a particular judicial division or criminal administrator in charge of the settlement on demand program to set the conference on a chosen date mutually agreed to. Attorneys also may ask for a certain date and time for the conference when requesting a settlement on demand.

Communications made in criminal settlement conferences are privileged under the terms of Arizona Evidence Rule 410( 3)( 4) with the exceptions noted in such Rule. 10 All settlement conferences are reported by a court reporter or electronically recorded and available for verbatim transcription.

When the court initially began doing settlement conferences in criminal cases, it was often a 30- to 45-minute process per case, but the consensus average time today is 10 to 30 minutes, which may be extended by the taking of any plea entered into after the conference. There are no partial settlements in criminal cases unlike in other divisions of the court.

As noted, in this article11 we explore the question of whether the program is worth it, especially in connection with the new settlement conference on demand policy, given the time they take and the impacts on other court proceedings. To help examine the question, we can assess the settlement rates available using the Court’s new innovative research program; in the next few months it may result in a computer

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