Fifteen juries in a year

St. Johns County courts disposed of 1,450 felony defendants in the twelve months that ended June 30, 2025, and another 3,562 defendants at the misdemeanor level. Fifteen of those 5,012 defendants reached a jury, and the arithmetic under that number says the same thing four different ways. Almost nothing here is decided by a jury, and almost everything ends in a plea or is dropped.

Where the numbers come from

The counts are published by the Office of the State Courts Administrator through a public search at trialstats.flcourts.org. The reports behind that search count defendants, which is not the same as counting cases and not the same as counting people.

At the felony level a filing is one defendant against whom an information or an indictment has been filed. At the county court level it is one defendant against whom a sworn complaint, a notice to appear, an information or an indictment has been filed. A disposition, at either level, is one defendant for whom a court has rendered a final decision ending the proceeding. The felony dispositions below appear in the order the report itself lists them.

All but 12 of those 1,450 felony defendants ended before a trial ever started, and the plea line by itself is 81.2 percent of everything disposed. The twelve that went to a jury broke down as eight convictions, three pleas entered once the trial was under way, and one acquittal or dismissal. Not one defendant was tried by a judge without a jury. The county court side is larger and ends the same way.

Three of the 3,562 defendants disposed at the county court level reached a jury. Two of those three were acquitted or had the case dismissed, and the third was convicted.

The 791 nobody reads about

The second line on the county court table is a term of art, and the state’s reporting manual defines it in a single sentence of its glossary. That manual is the Summary Reporting System manual, which is the rulebook the clerks of court fill these forms out against.

A decision by the prosecutor not to file an information against an accused person.

The manual’s county court chapter is more specific about which defendants belong on that line. A no file is a defendant against whom all charges are dropped because the prosecutor did not obtain an indictment, file an information, or pursue the initial complaint in any way. There were 542 of those at the county court level in one year.

At the felony level the report does not put no files in the disposition table at all. The manual tells clerks to report them instead on a separate page headed Special Proceedings, and for this county, in the same twelve months, that page shows 249. The same page shows 603 probation revocation hearings, 69 bond hearings, 22 post conviction relief motions and seven appeals up from county court.

That is 791 defendants the prosecutor did not file on, on top of the 452, felony and county court together, whose every count was dismissed. Taken together those two groups are 1,243 defendants who in one year ended with no conviction on the case in front of them. The three reports account for 5,261 defendants in total, which puts that group at 23.6 percent of them.

The circuit, against the other nineteen

The same office publishes an annual Statistical Reference Guide, whose third chapter ranks all twenty of Florida’s judicial circuits on two rates. The first is the share of dispositions that came out of a jury trial, and for the circuit that covers St. Johns, Flagler, Putnam and Volusia counties, which is the Seventh, seated in Daytona Beach, the guide puts that rate at 0.4 percent. Reading down that column, it is the lowest of the twenty figures the guide prints there.

The second rate is the share of dispositions recorded as guilty, and that circuit’s figure is 96.2 percent. Reading down that column, it is the highest of the twenty, and statewide the same table gives 1.3 percent and 86.3 percent.

Across all four counties the guide counts 34 jury trial dispositions for the year, which it breaks into 10 acquittals or dismissals, seven pleas, and 17 convictions. The guide’s county court chapter counts another 14 in the same circuit, out of 17,786 dispositions, which it rounds to 0.1 percent.

What the reports say about themselves

Both defendant reports carry the same two lines at the foot of every page, and the first of them is this:

These data are used to measure trial court activity in Florida and are not intended as a measure of efficiency of the judiciary, state attorneys, or public defenders.

And the second:

These data are based on information received from the Clerks of Court and are extracted from a static database containing the official trial court statistics. Dismissals cannot be attributed to a single individual or agency. Dismissals include charges dismissed prior to trial and/or motion of prosecutor.

The second of those two lines is the one that bears on every dismissal figure in the tables above. A dismissal in those tables is not a scorecard but a count assembled from clerk filings. The state itself says that count cannot be traced back to any one office or any one person.

Four things these numbers are not

They are not people, since the state counts defendants and one person who goes through twice in a year is two defendants. Two people in one incident are two defendants under the same rule.

They are not the whole county court, because non-DUI criminal traffic and driving under the influence are reported separately. For this county the same guide lists 3,279 of the first and 596 of the second in the same year, and neither is inside the 3,562.

They are not a conviction count, because the plea line includes defendants for whom adjudication was withheld, which the manual instructs clerks to report in the same place as a plea. The line marked Other is its own category, which the guide says covers deferred prosecution and other pretrial diversion or probation programs, defendants found unable to stand trial, cases disposed on bond estreature, and cases closed for administrative reasons.

They are not everything filed, since the felony report also counts 1,330 defendants filed on in the same twelve months and 3,388 at the county court level. The guide’s own county table lists 1,330 for this county, which is the same number arrived at a different way.

What a reader cannot do

Following a single case from filing to outcome in this county is not something a reader can do from a browser. The Clerk of Court’s site carries a court calendar at /Benchmark/CourtDocket.aspx, and it redirects to a page that reads, in full: “Sorry, you do not have permissions to this page.”

The statewide system is shut by policy, and the Comprehensive Case Information System is run by the clerks of court. Its sign-in page is headed “FOR GOVERNMENTAL USE ONLY” and says its users “include the judicial community, state and local law enforcement, state agencies, and the Florida Legislature.”

A newspaper is not on that list, and neither is a reader. The county-level counts in those three reports are reachable by anybody with a browser and an afternoon, and the single case behind any one of those 5,012 lines is not. In one year, in one county, 1,243 defendants ended with no conviction on the case in front of them.