Racine, WI Criminal Defense Attorney

Racine County Circuit Court runs 10 branches, the largest court in our practice area (Kenosha has 8, Walworth has 4). Branch assignment in your case is not random in the way most defendants assume. Felony cases are routed to a smaller subset of branches with felony calendars; misdemeanors get distributed across the full bench; specialized treatment-court cases (drug court, mental health court, OWI court) go to the branches with the relevant assignment that calendar year.

Branch culture varies materially. Some branches run tight pretrial schedules with limited continuances; others give defense counsel more runway for investigation and motion practice. Some judges credit certain mitigation evidence (treatment progress, employment continuity) more heavily at sentencing than others. ADAs assigned to a branch develop working relationships with that judge that affect plea-conference outcomes. None of this is in any handbook, it is institutional knowledge that a defense lawyer who is in the building daily picks up over years.

Patrick Cafferty has tried cases in this courthouse since 1994. The current branch rotation that took effect in late 2025 reshuffled criminal calendars across multiple branches; we updated our case-strategy notes accordingly.

The Racine Police Department's 2024 Annual Report makes the city's enforcement profile concrete. RPD wrote 6,434 traffic citations in 2024, of which 182 were operating-under-the-influence. The OWI count understates total Racine OWI exposure, State Patrol files an additional volume from I-94 and Highway 20, and Racine County Sheriff cites in the city's outer ring. Add those and the actual Racine City OWI caseload is meaningfully higher than the 182 RPD line item.

On the criminal side, RPD reported 333 violent crimes (homicide, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault) and 992 property crimes in 2024, both within city limits. The violent-crime number drives the felony intake at the courthouse two blocks from our office; the property-crime number drives the bulk of misdemeanor and ordinance-court traffic. We see the case-mix from both. Intake from RPD's domestic-violence response unit is steady and substantial, every domestic-related charge in Wisconsin carries the federal-firearm consequences attached to the § 968.075 domestic-abuse modifier, regardless of whether the underlying charge is a felony or misdemeanor.