Many cases you manage may involve the courts. Ohio SACWIS allows you to keep track of court case participants, legal actions, and your court calendar.
To access the court functions, navigate to the Case Overview screen for the appropriate case. Then, click the Legal Action link in the navigation bar on the left. The Case Legal Actions / Delinquency Participants Filter Criteria screen appears. Links are available for each Case Participant, Maintain Legal Action and Maintain Delinquency.
Maintain Legal Action link: This presents all of the legal actions associated with this case for the case participant associated. Such actions include complaints, motions, hearings, notifications, rulings, and subpoenas. From this view, you add new legal action records, view or edit existing records associated with the case and view legal action histories. You can also add legal actions and group them to existing legal actions, creating a history of actions on a particular case.
Maintain Delinquency link: Displays any delinquency hearings or adjudications associated with the case participant. You can also edit legal action records with which the person is associated. This view lists the actions grouped with a primary legal action, delinquency and adjudication history.
Case Participants link: View participants in the case who have open legal status records.
You add legal action records from the Case Legal Actions / Delinquency Participants Filter Criteria screen.
While most legal actions are simply "recorded" in Ohio SACWIS, there are two ways to add complaint and motion records:
You "Create" a complaint or motion record to generate a document that you are filing with a court. In this method, you enter the details required to file the action with the court. What you enter in the system then prints on the complaint or motion document.
You "Record" a complaint or motion if the actions have already been filed, for example, by a prosecutor. In this method, you record only minimal details about the action in the system.
When you add a legal action, you can also group it to other legal actions or independently, thereby allowing the system to reflect the series of actions on a single court case.
When you group legal actions, begin by selecting the Legal Action in the
drop down next to the Legal Action and Grouping button. This is located
on the Participant Legal Action Filter Criteria screen in the Participant
Legal Action Information table.
It is possible that you may not have all of the details necessary to fully complete a legal action record. In this situation, you can create the record, then edit it later. You can edit a legal action until the file stamp date or the journalized date on the record has been completed. At that point, the record has become a court document and cannot be modified. However, you can end the legal action, indicate that it was created in error, or amend it.
While in much of the system you can delete records that were entered in error, in the Legal Actions area, you cannot delete legal action records. Instead, you can mark them, "Created in Error". This is done by navigating to the Ruling Information screen.
For complaint and motion records, you end the legal action and indicate that the record was an error. For other legal actions you select a check box to indicate that the record was an error. You can indicate that a legal action was created in error as long as no other legal action is linked to it.
The system automatically creates a court calendar based on the dates entered on hearing records. You can view your court calendar at any time by selecting Case tab; then Court Calendar tab. If you are a supervisor, you can view the court calendars of workers in your unit.