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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