The circuit court of the city of St. Louis has 24 circuit judges. Last month, in the closing days of the legislative session, the Missouri House of Representatives unsuccessfully tried to reduce that number by 25 percent.

The manner in which the initiative was handled is a good measure of its merits:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bryan Stevenson, R-Webb City, didn’t introduce a bill that could have been debated coolly and deliberately during committee hearings. Rather, with the clock ticking down on the end of session, Mr. Stevenson tried to stick his idea onto a vaguely related judiciary bill that just had passed the Senate. No hearings were held.

Whenever lawmakers try to rush through major changes using procedural tricks under cover of chaos, it’s usually a sign they are up to no good. That was the case here. Thankfully, the effort failed.

In making his effort, Mr. Stevenson was relying on a study that, at first glance, appeared to bolster his argument that the court in St. Louis has too many judges. But the study is fundamentally flawed.

The Missouri Supreme Court commissioned the National Center for State Courts — a well-regarded judicial think tank — to a conduct an assessment of the judicial workload in all of the state’s circuit courts. The premise was that caseloads alone — the raw number of civil, criminal, domestic, juvenile and probate cases filed and disposed of each year — could determine how many judges a circuit reasonably needs to conduct its business.

The study focused on “workload.” The investigators convened a committee of judges to draw up a list of tasks required of them for each case. Then they had judges keep time sheets tracking how long each task took to complete. They also calculated how much time courts spend each day on such things as travel, lunch and breaks.

Finally, they took all the statewide data, calculated how much of a judicial day is allotted to which specific tasks and transformed raw caseload numbers into projections of reasonable workloads per judge.
The final data indicated that some judicial circuits lacked enough judges to handle the work, while the city court was deemed to have four more judicial officers (circuit judges, associate circuit judges and commissioners) than it needed.

The study acknowledged that judges in rural circuits often spend more time traveling to work than their counterparts in St. Louis, but it assumed that all other factors were identical from circuit to circuit. That was its fatal flaw.

Defendants charged with felonies in St. Louis, knowing that city juries often are sympathetic to defendants, are far more likely to demand jury trials than defendants in other circuits, as is their constitutional right. But jury trials take far more time than bench trials (in which judges render decisions on their own) or cases disposed of through plea bargains.

It’s disappointing that a respected organization such as National Center for State Courts would overlook this basic fact. As the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis pointed out, “The survey assumes that 1 percent of felony criminal cases will be tried. While this may be true statewide, in (St. Louis) more than 2 percent of the felony cases are tried. If this adjustment is made, the survey would allocate an additional 2. 5 judges to the [St. Louis] Circuit.”

What other differences might require adjustments to the formula? The investigators need to check their assumptions carefully against the real world. The administration of justice must be about the lives, safety and stability of families, children and businesses — not neat statistical models and political ideology.