Starke County Prosecutor, Nicholas Bourff, is in his third month on the job and has already made a suggestion to help speed up C and D Felony proceedings.
“One of the proposals I’ve made is to try, even if it’s with the C and D Felonies, to see if a case is going ahead to trial, and we know it will, to see if we could get a bench trial set, which just involves the Judge, instead of a jury trial,” said Bourff. “The one major drawback there is that if a defendant wants a jury trial, he or she has that right. If the defendant agrees to a bench trial, then it would save thousands of dollars and it would shave off quite a bit of time as far as eliminating the need for jury selection. In my experience as a defense attorney, the majority of my clients would not have had a problem with going to a bench trial.”
