Such a backlog leads to significant delays: Last year, the average case in criminal court took 316 days to go from arraignment to completion, he said.
As things stand now, when the office gets a case, an assistant district attorney handles it from arraignment through disposition, without necessarily communicating the facts to other prosecutors, Mr. Vance said.
Amid all this confusing variety, however, there is pressure toward order internally, from the arraignment of vice and appeal to virtue, and externally, from the often shadowy dramatic situation that frames the poem.
The Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, has 120 days from the arraignment to decide whether to pursue the death penalty, a spokeswoman for his office said.
"I've got a great deal of work to do before reaching that decision," said Mr. Brown, who has 120 days from the arraignment, scheduled for July 27, to decide.
Indicted on charges of participating in a fraud conspiracy that led to Enron's bankruptcy, Mr. Lay emerged from his arraignment yesterday and held a bizarre news conference, where he proclaimed his innocence.
Some 1,400 miles from the arraignment proceedings of the military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay and just a few miles from ground zero, relatives of Sept. 11 victims as well as police officers and firefighters who survived the attack on the World Trade Center gathered in Brooklyn to watch the hearing.
Following are excerpts from Saddam Hussein's arraignment yesterday, as transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House Inc. from a translation of the Arabic-language proceedings broadcast by CNN.
Evidence from pre-arraignment interviews should be suppressed in every case, and the district attorney's office should be stopped from using them because they force defendants to give up rights they do not even know they have.
"We went to Brooklyn and Queens, and they embraced technology and change, and we cut the time from arrest to arraignment by a third.
