When New York City announced in November that it would start issuing tickets instead of making arrests for possession of small quantities of marijuana, the state’s judges were alarmed. Already overburdened and mired in time-consuming bureaucracy, summons courts faced the prospect of having to process tens of thousands of additional tickets each year. That change spurred plans, unveiled on Tuesday, to transform the city’s summons process in the hopes of making it more efficient for judges, lawyers and the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers charged with low-level violations each year.
