After a year of planning involving a host of agencies, the Indiana Supreme Court’s Division of State Court Administration’s technology staff implemented the Odyssey case management system in the 22 criminal courts in Marion County, completing the transition to Odyssey for the Superior and Circuit Courts.
In 2009, Odyssey was deployed to the Marion County traffic court in order to take advantage of the Division’s ability to file traffic tickets electronically in Odyssey. In 2013, Odyssey was deployed to the 13 courts with civil jurisdiction.
JUSTIS, Marion County’s legacy case management system was installed over two decades ago. In addition to the courts, JUSTIS was used by many agencies including the jail, law enforcement, the prosecutor, public defenders, probation and the circuit court clerk. At the same time the courts were transitioning to Odyssey, the majority of other justice agencies were acquiring a new system to replace JUSTIS. The monthly planning sessions focused on coordinating how the multiple systems would communicate and exchange data needed to ensure continuity of operations within the individual agency and between all agencies.
Odyssey is a court and clerk case management system and was not designed or intended to serve the jail or the prosecutor. The new case management system for the jails went live on June 1st. The prosecutor began using a new system on June 4th. On June 6th, the public defender’s office and the judges and clerk deployed their respective systems and the prosecutor began e-filing in Odyssey on the same day.
Due to the amount of time needed to extract the legacy data from JUSTIS, the deployment of Odyssey to the Marion County criminal courts was completed in two phases:
- The first phase involved shutting down JUSTIS on June 6th.
- The second phase involved converting the data in JUSTIS to Odyssey over the weekend of June 15th.
Marion County is unique because it has an arrestee processing center (APC) open for business 24/7. As soon as JUSTIS was shut down on Friday evening, June 6th, Odyssey was ‘turned on’ and the courts began filing all new cases in Odyssey. For the next nine days, events on pending cases were manually tracked.
For the second phase, the county IT staff extracted data from JUSTIS, which was then prepared for the conversion to Odyssey. At the close of business on Friday June 13th, work began to convert more than 1.6 million criminal cases into the Odyssey database. On Monday, June 16th, and with Odyssey back online, the Division’s deployment team supported over 750 users in the offices of the judges, clerk, prosecutor, and law enforcement agencies as the second and final phase was completed. Division staff remained on site to support the users during the last two weeks of June.
In 2012, over 51,000 criminal cases were filed in the Marion County criminal courts. A crucial part of this deployment involved the data exchange between the prosecutor’s case management system (dubbed ‘INPCMS’), supported by the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council (IPAC), and Odyssey. Although an interface already existed between INPCMS and Odyssey that allowed cases to be electronically created in Odyssey, this interface had to be greatly enhanced to meet the needs of the prosecutor in the busiest county in Indiana.
The expanded interface had to accommodate additional data fields coming from INPCMS to Odyssey and Odyssey needed to send court and calendar events and disposition information back to INPCMS. Needless to say, the volume of new criminal cases filed in the Marion County Criminal Courts surpasses the volume in any other county in Indiana. In the 60 days following the deployment of Odyssey, over 9,500 new criminal cases were created through the INPCMS/Odyssey e-filing interface. And, following the deployment of INPCMS to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, IPAC will be able to offer the enhanced functionality of INPCMS, including e-filing, to other prosecutors in counties using Odyssey.
Work will continue through the remainder of 2014 to enhance and improve the quality and completeness of data that is shared with all Marion County justice partners. In the coming months, Marion County will begin sending all criminal disposition information to the Indiana State Police criminal history repository, called CHRIS, via the Odyssey/CHRIS interface. With JUSTIS, the criminal disposition information was sent to INPCMS electronically. INPCMS would forward the data through their interface to CHRIS. The benefits of using the Odyssey/CHRIS interface is that the system generates an error report that contains disposition information that failed to upload to CHRIS due to inaccurate or missing data. With Odyssey, the county will be able to ‘work’ the cases that failed to upload to CHRIS, update or correct the information, and resubmit to CHRIS.