When one the nation's
most expert and sophisticated legal publications decided to devote
its March 2000 issue to trying to define President Clinton's legal
legacy, one of the central sources it turned to was TRAC. The
122-page March 2000 issue had six major articles -- one of them
a five-page spread examining the performance of federal prosecutors.
A special team of American Lawyer reporters used TRAC data to
document and explore such questions as why the Justice Department's
enforcement of the gun laws was sharply down from 1992 to 1997,
why federal enforcement by the U.S. Attorney's office in Northern
California (San Francisco) had gone into a serious slump and why
the median time to prosecute a criminal case in Northern Illinois
(Chicago) had almost doubled. (The article included ten eye-catching
graphics.)
