View the interactive MDJ data visualizer on our TableauPublic page.
Magisterial district judges (MDJs) play a pivotal role in the day-to-day operation of the court system in Allegheny County and are primary points of contact with the legal system. Their role includes presiding over traffic tickets, summary charges, truancy, preliminary arraignments, preliminary hearings & eviction hearings. Because of the ways they interact with people in the county, they have been noted as “some of the most powerful people in Pennsylvania’s court system.”
Life-altering decisions are issued every day within these lower courts. Whether someone will be removed from their home or whether they will be held based on their ability to pay bond, even while they remain constitutionally innocent without much transparency, oversight, or accountability.
The focus in this project falls onto two of the most consequential hearings that MDJs oversee: eviction proceedings and preliminary arraignments (hearings where bond or bail is first set).
Magisterial district courtrooms are not “courts of record”, meaning there is no transcript for proceedings and rarely any outside observer to ensure that the rights of those involved in the proceedings are protected. This is particularly true for eviction proceedings and preliminary arraignments as these two types of hearings frequently occur in the absence of outside counsel: tenants facing eviction and defendants facing wealth-based detention almost never have an attorney to assist them.
Methodology:
The data presented here shows how magistrate judges compare in terms of average cash bail amount, frequency of denying bail, and frequency of ruling in favor of eviction. All magisterial judges who preside over both eviction proceedings and preliminary arraignments were included.
The data used in this demonstration was collected over a period of months from publicly-accessible court dockets. Data related to landlord-tenant cases and preliminary arraignment bail were collected from 08/14/2020 to 12/31/2020.
The data sets involved are not meant to be exhaustive; rather, they are a snapshot, focused specifically on the height of the pandemic, after Governor Wolf’s eviction moratorium expired and during the many spikes in reported positive PCR test results at the Allegheny County Jail.
Results:
These statistics show, to put it bluntly, how likely an MDJ was to rule against a tenant, rendering them homeless in the middle of a global pandemic and greatly increasing their likelihood of contracting COVID-19 and becoming seriously ill or dying as a result.
The two categories dealing with bail-setting—amount assigned and rate of denials—both demonstrate how likely an MDJ was to attempt to force community members into the Allegheny County Jail in the middle of a global pandemic, greatly increasing their likelihood of contracting COVID-19 and becoming seriously ill or dying as a result.
View the interactive MDJ data visualizer on our TableauPublic page.