Tucson City Court will be closed to the public for business from Friday, April 1 through Monday, April 4, 2016 with courtrooms in operation on April 5, 2016. The Court will use this time to transition to a new case management system and will reopen for normal business on Wednesday, April 6, 2016 with its new case management system, Arizona Judicial Automated Case System (AJACS).
Tucson City Court will be open on a limited basis on Tuesday, April 5, 2016. Limited operations will consist of scheduled hearings and trials in courtrooms. The customer service lobby and website will be closed.
People having a scheduled court date of April 5, 2016 are expected to appear in court unless they received a notice from the court rescheduling their court date.
The Court’s current case management system, AZTEC is approaching 17 years of age and while still functional lacks automation efficiencies developed over the two decades. Tucson City Court will be the largest volume court in the Arizona court system to transition to AJACS and will be converting approximately 440,000 open cases to the new system. The Court will only be converting open cases to AJACS. Cases which are adjudicated and met the electronic records retention period will not transition to AJACS.
Tucson City Court staff and the Arizona Supreme Court staff have been working together to ensure a smooth transition to AJACS with little to no impact on the public. Persons with active open cases at Tucson City Court do not need to do anything with their case(s) for the transition to AJACS.
AJACS provides many benefits to the Court and the public. It will provide more automated noticing to the public on the status of their court case. It improves financial accountability in individual cases and for the Court in general. It reduces redundant data entry in the Court’s database and will improve the scheduling and processing of charges filed with the Court. Another benefit to the public is the inclusion of an Automated Electronic Records Retention Destruction Program. Once a court case has been closed (completed) and met the electronic record retention period, the program will automatically remove it from the AJACS database.