Bermuda’s courts have seen a 25 percent increase in the number of criminal cases they deal with in the past three years, according to new figures.There is also a higher percentage of court cases that end with a conviction - 77 percent now compared to 70 percent then.According to Mark Pettingill, a defence lawyer and the justice spokesman for the Bermuda Democratic Alliance, that is a “good healthy” result for the Department of Public Prosecutions.Every year, the Budget book lists a number of ‘output measures’ detailing the work of various departments through the year. The book issued on Friday shows that during the course of the 2010/11 year which ends on March 31 the courts have dealt with 1,076 cases so far. Of those, 876 have resulted in a conviction and 200 in an acquittal, which is a conviction rate of 77 percent.That compares to a total of 837 cases dealt with in the 2009/10 year, of which 647 resulted in a conviction, giving a conviction rate of 71 percent. The year before, there were 810 cases before the courts, with 624 convictions a rate of 70 percent.That means there was a 25 percent increase in the number of cases before the courts this year compared to 2008/9.“Prosecutions are doing the best job they can with what they’ve got. There has been a pretty substantial increase in the cases being heard,” said Mr Pettingill.“I think the Department of Public Prosecutions has very good people on the ground, and compared to the rest of the world, that is a good healthy conviction rate.“A good criminal attorney in London operates on the basis that 25 percent acquittals would be a very successful defence attorney, so this is in the bracket of what it should be. With the staff they have and the job they are doing you can’t take a lot of issue with that.”The Department of Public Prosecutions was the only department in the Ministry of Justice to get its budget increased rather than cut this year. It got an extra $75,000, taking its annual budget for 2011/12 to $2,992,000 compared to an allocation of $2,917,000 for the previous year.However, Mr Pettingill expressed concern that that increase of less than three percent won’t be enough, considering the increasing number of cases before the courts. He’d also like to see resources in place for better technology to help prosecute cases.“Their people are only going to be as good as the resources they have. At the Old Bailey [London’s central criminal court] I was overwhelmed with the technological support the prosecutors had. There were projection screens coming down from the ceiling, and that’s the oldest criminal court in the world.“The more resources that we can put in to courts and crime is where we should be going,” he advised.Shadow Minister of Justice Trevor Moniz said he would like to know the basis of the figures in the Budget book. “Do these convictions include cases where people plead guilty or where they say they are not guilty and have a trial and are convicted?” he asked.However, he said the statistics on the conviction rate are better than they used to be.“We used to have a conviction rate of about 40 percent. Juries were afraid to convict. Now, I think with all the crime in the community, they are getting fed up,” he said.Police figures show there has been a gradual decrease in crimes committed in Bermuda in recent years. There were 4,575 crimes in 2010, 5,333 in 2009 and 5,550 in 2008.Meanwhile the number of arrests has increased. A total of 5,082 people were arrested in 2010 compared to 4,556 in 2009 and 3,255 in 2008.lUseful websites: www.gov.bm, www.thealliance.bm, www.ubp.bm