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SHELBY COUNTY
PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE
2010 YEAR-END REPORT
 During 2010 the Criminal/Juvenile Divisions of my office handled over 6,834 cases. Included in that caseload are 218 Major Felony (Murder, Class A, B & C) matters; 459 Class D Felony prosecutions, including 53 Felony O.V.W.I. cases; 1,491 Misdemeanor offenses; and 3,765 Infraction cases.
In addition to those cases, we also prosecuted 162 Juvenile matters and filed 316 Search Warrants and Miscellaneous Criminal Cases.
Our Child Support Division collected $4,610,144.00 in child support payments.
Shelby County continues to buck many state and national crime trends. Conventional wisdom is that crime tends to rise when the economy is in a slump. Slump hardly describes the economic recession that we have been experiencing for the past two or three years. Nevertheless, law enforcement has managed to keep a lid of crime in our county. I would have expected to see a rise in crimes such as theft, shoplifting and alcohol related offenses over the past year. Instead, our statistics remained relatively stable. While our major felony cases, such as Class A, B and C felonies were up very slightly over last year (by seven cases) our filings for misdemeanor and "petty" crimes were actually down by 8.7%
We filed no murder cases in 2010. We did, however, conclude the sentencing on one murder case that we had tried to a jury and won a conviction on shortly before the first of the year. Jeremy Klakamp was sentenced to a term of sixty-five years in prison for the murder of Ronnie Schroder. From commission of the crime until sentencing took only eleven months. We would normally expect a typical murder case to take closer to two years to bring to trial.
I am most pleased to report that again this year we saw a significant reduction in the number of felony/repeat drunk driving cases. In 2005, following a particularly deadly year, my office partnered with local law enforcement agencies to step up our efforts to reduce the incidence of drunk driving in Shelby County. In 2010 we filed fifty-three felony drunk driving cases in Shelby Superior Court #2, our primary traffic court. That is down almost 21% from the year before. More significantly, it is the fifth year in a row that we have reduced that number. Last year we saw less than half of the number of felony drunk driving cases filed in Superior Court #2 as we did in the 2005.
I have to compliment the Shelby County Sheriff's Department, Shelbyville Police Department and all local law enforcement agencies for their work in the area of impaired driving enforcement. We asked them to step up and they have exceeded our expectations.
Interestingly, local officers actually wrote far fewer traffic citations last year than in previous years. Traffic citations written in the county were actually down by 656 from 2009.
Because of the great people who live here and the dedicated police officers who work here, Shelby County remains one of the safest places in Indiana to live. We are committed to keeping it that way.
– R. Kent Apsley |
