The Criminal Justice Improvement Committee (CJIC) was created in 2014 by the General Assembly to look at the Delaware Criminal Code, and “suggest efficiencies, improvements and cost savings to the criminal justice system … including but not limited to the following areas: statutes in the criminal code, identifying disproportionate, redundant, outdated, duplicative or inefficient statutes; crimes that should or should not constitute potential jail time;… bail and alternatives to incarceration including new technologies.”
During 2015 and 2016 substantial work was done to fulfill the mandate of the epilogue language in improving the Delaware Criminal Code and modernizing pretrial procedures. The CJIC, which is chaired by Senator Harris B. McDowell III, has set a series of public hearings to obtain community input on efforts to fulfill that mandate. The public hearings, one in each of Delaware’s counties, will be in two parts.
Each hearing will begin by focusing on the Improved Delaware Criminal Code. The preliminary documents outlining the Improved Criminal Code, and the methodology used to create it, are available for review at the links below.
The second part of each hearing will focus on modernization of Delaware’s pretrial system with a presentation about proposed reforms followed by public comment on those initiatives.
Those who wish to speak at the public hearings on either the draft Improved Delaware Criminal Code or following the pretrial modernization presentation, are asked to register, and submit written comments, to the following e-mail address:
Criminal.Justice.Improvement.Comm@delaware.gov
Speakers will be limited to five minutes in order to ensure that as many people as time allows will have a chance to offer comment.
When pre-registering please indicate which public hearing you are planning to attend and what topic you would like to speak about (Improved Delaware Criminal Code or pretrial modernization or both).
- April 3, 2017 at 6 p.m. at Clayton Hall, University of Delaware, 100 Pencader Way, Newark, DE
- April 10, 2017 at 6 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center at Delaware State University, 1200 N. DuPont Highway, Dover, DE
- April 13, 2017 at 6 p.m. at the University of Delaware’s Virden Retreat Center, 700 Pilottown Road, Lewes, DE