Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley today released a summary report on the first four years of the Firearm Priority Disposition Session, commonly known as “Gun Court,” announcing that the average duration of a firearm possession case has been cut by more than half while achieving an overall conviction rate that approaches 90%.

A dedicated set of sessions for gun possession cases and collateral offenses, Gun Court has been the site of more than 1,200 prosecutions since its inception in early 2006, Conley said. The process of adjudicating those cases has been streamlined such that a case that once took a year or more to go to trial is now disposed in an average of 146 days.

Appellate prosecutors assigned to the Gun Court have won more than 80% of their challenges to suppression orders, bringing guns back into evidence and setting the stage for trials or guilty pleas. The number of gun cases indicted from Gun Court to Suffolk Superior Court or adopted by Federal prosecutors jumped 18% from 2008 to 2009.

The number of Boston homicides by firearm has fallen each year the Gun Court has been in operation, statistics indicate, from 55 in 2006 to 34 in 2009.

Conley conceived of the Gun Court after hearing repeatedly from community members who were frustrated that gun defendants were back on the street so soon after arraignment and for so long before their cases were finally resolved. He approached Chief Justice Charles Johnson of the Boston Municipal Court Department with a plan to centralize gun cases in order to address those concerns and to clear a large backload in the district courts with the largest number of gun cases.

In 2006, the Dorchester and Roxbury divisions of the Boston Municipal Court began sending their gun possession cases to the Central Division of the BMC after pre-trial hearing dates. From there, a small team of experienced trial and appellate prosecutors – the newly created Gun Prosecution Task Force – would handle all subsequent court dates through final disposition.

In 2007, the Gun Court was expanded to take gun possession cases from the Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, and Central divisions of the BMC as well, and cases were sent immediately following arraignment. The overall Gun Court conviction rate – for firearms possession and collateral offenses such as drug possession or assault – has climbed each year from 80% in 2006 to 89% in 2009.

In the past two years, members of Conley’s Gun Prosecution Task Force won first-in-the-nation convictions based on thermal images of firearms discarded by suspects fleeing police. After developing MIT doctoral candidates in thermodynamics and related fields as expert witnesses, they introduced images from a heat-seeking device that linked discarded firearms to the men who possessed them, winning convictions at a bench trial in 2008 and a jury trial in 2009.

The report is online here.