464,000 criminal case results weren’t reported to state Department of Justice

Citing technical shortcomings in a decades-old case-management system, Los Angeles Superior Court officials said on Tuesday the results of roughly 464,000 criminal cases dating back to the 1980s were never reported to the state Department of Justice, affecting the official criminal records of more than 400,000 people.

According to the court, the backlog was discovered last year during a technology-modernization project that began roughly a decade ago to replace the court’s Trial Court Information System, which was originally installed in the 1980s. Court officials said “a lack of technical programming” in the TCIS system left court staff unaware of thousands of “arrest disposition reports” that were never reported to the state Department of Justice.

Arrest disposition reports detail the outcomes of arrests — either convictions or dismissals — and are filed with the DOJ so defendants’ criminal records are kept up to date. Court officials said their investigation identified about 464,000 disposition reports that were never filed with the state — 380,000 cases that involved convictions and about 84,000 dismissals.

Of the 380,000 convictions that were never reported, about 147,000 involved felonies and 233,000 were misdemeanors, according to the court. Of the dismissed cases that were never reported, about 61,000 involved felony cases and 23,000 were misdemeanors.

According to the court, the 464,000 affected disposition reports involved roughly 408,000 individual defendants, with the cases occurring from the early 1980s to 2023.

“This means that individuals whose arrests resulted in filed criminal cases that were disposed by conviction or dismissal may not be currently reflected on their criminal histories, although roughly half of the individuals represented in the backlog have unrelated prior or subsequent convictions or dismissals that were reported to the DOJ,” according to a statement by the court.

Court officials said all of the affected cases are now being sent to the DOJ, which is working to process them into the records system. The court also insists that its new case management system, along with other “failsafe mechanisms,” are flagging cases that have not been reported to DOJ, so there have been no additional cases of failed DOJ transmissions since 2023.

“The court is committed to building public trust and confidence in the judicial system, and that demands transparency when the court falls short of its standards,” Executive Officer and Clerk of Court David W. Slayton said in a statement. “At the end of the day, it is most important that the criminal history records be complete and accurate, and the court has taken steps to ensure this is the case.

“The court is collaborating with the California Department of Justice to mitigate the backlog as expeditiously as possible. The court’s leadership team has devoted significant resources to modernizing the court’s infrastructure through innovation and forward-thinking investments to ensure an incident of this magnitude does not occur again.”