Everyone knows the courts are overloaded. Politicians argue about sentencing being too soft or too harsh. But here's what they're not telling you: 53,004 people walked out of New Zealand courts in 2024 with guilty verdicts but no conviction recorded.

That's a discharge without conviction. It means you admit the offence, or a judge finds you guilty, but the court decides recording a conviction would be out of proportion to the crime. You might get a fine, community work, or nothing at all. But your record stays clean.

This isn't some niche legal technicality. It's happening more than ever. In 2020, courts discharged 32,301 people without conviction. By 2024, that figure hit 53,004. It's nearly doubled in four years. You have to go back to 2007 to find a comparable number.

Why does this matter? Because a conviction carries weight. It can block you from certain jobs, restrict overseas travel, affect custody arrangements. A discharge without conviction removes those consequences. It's meant for cases where the punishment of a permanent record would be excessive given the offence.

But the scale is striking. That's 53,004 cases where judges decided the offence was proven, but the consequences of a conviction were too harsh. It's more than 1,000 discharges every single week.

The trajectory is steep: 2021 saw 29,805 discharges. Then 35,124 in 2022. Then 44,334 in 2023. Now 53,004. That's a 64% increase in just four years (Source: Stats NZ, charges-by-offence-type).

What's driving this? The data doesn't tell us which offences are being discharged, or why judges are granting them more often. But the numbers suggest either courts are seeing more cases where a conviction would be disproportionate, or the threshold for granting discharges has shifted.

Politicians talk about crime in absolutes: tougher sentences, more accountability, protecting victims. But 53,004 times last year, a judge looked at a guilty verdict and said: this person shouldn't carry this for life.

That's not soft on crime. That's discretion. And it's being used more than at any point since 2007.

The public debate about justice tends to focus on who goes to prison and for how long. But this data shows a different story playing out in courtrooms across the country: tens of thousands of cases where guilt is established, but the punishment stops short of a permanent mark.

Whether that's the right call depends on the case. But it's happening at record levels, and almost nobody's talking about it.