• To report information on the dispositions of DUI cases in order to make improvements to the DUI enforcement, prosecution and/or adjudication systems
Court Monitoring in South Carolina
Our court monitoring program is funded by grants from the Office of Highway Safety and Justice Programs (OHSJP) within the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. Our initial grant was for three years and began on October 1, 2015, addressing Greenville, Pickens, Richland, and Kershaw Counties, the 13 th and 5 th judicial circuits. Our second grant began on October 1, 2017 and added Horry, Berkeley, and Charleston Counties. When the original grant ended in September 2018, OHSJP funded a new grant where we proposed monitoring in Greenville, Spartanburg, Richland, and Lexington Counties, meaning we are now monitoring in seven of the state’s largest counties. Since that time, OHSJP removed the three-year length on the grants. If funding is approved for our annual applications, we currently plan to remain in those seven counties in an attempt to measure long-term impact of these efforts. The counties we select are supported by data provided by OHSJP. We determined our counties of focus based on the number of fatal and serious injury alcohol-related crashes. None of our counties were selected based on known “problems” with those counties in terms of adjudication or prosecution. In fact, we knew very little about what the status of those counties were in terms of DUI case outcomes or prosecution approaches until we began monitoring there. To achieve the above listed goals, MADD South Carolina Court Monitoring staff and, to a lesser extent, volunteers collected specific information on DUI cases from court hearings and through case research online. Data collected for each case included jurisdiction, offender demographics, date of arrest and court appearances, original charges, disposition of the case (plea, reduction in charges, guilty/not guilty verdict, etc.), and extent of the penalties issued. While detailed information was collected, not all of the data has been shared in this report. Our protocol is to not share data on specific judges or prosecutors with data being shared at the county levels only.
MADD Court Monitoring Program Volunteers
Court Monitoring volunteers are recruited through speaking engagements, social media postings, volunteer board postings, career/internship fairs, referrals from existing volunteers, and volunteer inquiries made to MADD South Carolina. All Court Monitoring Program volunteers complete an application and agree to a background check performed by MADD’s national office. Once the background check has been approved, the volunteers complete a three-hour online training program and in-court training with
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