Judicial System Put in ‘Crisis Situation’ by Drug Crackdown

Campaigns by Los Angeles County law enforcement agencies to arrest more drug dealers have further clogged an already jammed criminal justice system, bringing closer the specter of judicial “gridlock,” according to numerous authorities.

The trend has implications not only for the criminal courts but for the everyday civil litigant, such as the man who sues his insurance company for refusing to pay a claim.

Today, it takes nearly 3 1/2 years for such civil cases to come to trial because of a backlog of more than 30,000 lawsuits. By the end of 1987, that wait may be closer to five years because an increasing number of civil courts are being borrowed for the growing number of criminal trials, said Frank S. Zolin, executive officer of the county’s Superior Court system.

“It’s really a crisis situation,” he said.

Felony narcotics cases filed by the district attorney’s Central District have been running as much as 36% ahead of the 1985 pace, and the total number of felony cases filed countywide rose 24% during the fiscal year that ended in June.

By contrast, the number of county prosecutors has increased 11% in the last two years and the number of Superior Court judges has increased 9% in the last five years.

Prosecutors and judges insist that the quality of prosecution has not been eroded by the increased workload, but warn that without an infusion of additional personnel the system will run out of flexibility.

“We all think we’re approaching that limit,” said Michael E. Tranbarger, a special assistant to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner for branch operations.

The central problem, authorities say, is the shortage of Superior Court judges, who try felony cases. The county has 224, only 18 more than it had five years ago.

With increasing frequency, the daily calendar of new felony trials exceeds the number of criminal court judges available to hear them.

Suburban criminal courts that were once used to take the pressure off judges in the downtown Criminal Courts Building are now equally jammed, and often need to transfer their overflow downtown.

The overflow is aggravated by speedy-trial laws that limit postponements. A criminal suspect is entitled to have his trial begin within 60 days of the time the charges are filed.

When the county runs out of available criminal courts, the remaining “last-day” trials (those in which the delay has reached 60 days) are transferred to civil courtrooms.

This shifting, in turn, forces postponements or interruptions of lawsuits that have already waited an average of 40 months to come to trial because of the county’s civil court backlog.

Such techniques have been used for years in Los Angeles County. They are an informal alternative to more severe steps, such as those taken two months ago in New York City, when 20 civil court judges were transferred to criminal assignments because of New York’s huge backlog of narcotics cases related to the sale and use of “crack,” a cheap, highly addictive derivative of cocaine.

However, there are now some fears that Los Angeles’ system may not be sufficient.

For example, in the past it has been common for court officials to find their criminal courtrooms filled with ongoing cases and seven or eight new criminal trials scheduled to begin. But on a recent day, said Assistant Presiding Superior Court Judge Jack. E. Goertzen, there were 40 “last-day” criminal cases “that had to be gotten to trial” immediately somewhere in the system.

Officials were able to delay a number of these trials when the suspects either entered guilty pleas or agreed to waive their right to a speedy trial.

However, it is impossible to predict what percentage of suspects will forgo or postpone the start of their trials. Hence county officials are for the first time confronting the possibility that several consecutive days of massive overflow will paralyze civil litigation by filling all the county’s civil courts with criminal cases.

“That has not happened, but it’s not inconceivable,” Goertzen said. “When you get 40 in one day, you start to get a little worried about what the future might hold.”

If such a scenario did occur, the county would have to ask the state Judicial Council for judges from other counties to break the logjam.

The prosecutors who feel increased pressure from the heightened number of cases are those who do not have the luxury of working in one of the district attorney’s specialized units. These lower-level deputies juggle a variety of rape, robbery, murder and drug cases or are assigned to more tedious jobs, such as supervising the flow of defendants through Municipal Court preliminary hearings, where judges determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify holding a trial.

In the district attorney’s Pomona office, deputies are handling about 55 cases each, compared to about 30 six months ago, according to Bill Johnson, who heads the office.

In the Van Nuys office, prosecutors in the first nine months of this year filed 416 felony cases that went through a preliminary hearing and then either ended in a guilty plea or went to trial. That was an 84% increase over the same period of time in 1985.

Narcotics cases now make up between 65% and 70% of all felony cases filed in the Van Nuys office, which handles all narcotics cases for the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. That proportion is roughly twice as high as a few years ago, authorities say.

“We’ve almost doubled (the caseload) with the same number of deputy district attorneys,” said Andrew W. Diamond, the prosecutor in charge of Van Nuys Municipal Court.

Among the deputy district attorneys responsible for guiding two-dozen cases a day through preliminary hearings, “Twelve-hour days are not unusual,” Diamond said. “A lunch hour is something that you spend out of court over your files nine out of 10 times. Legal research is something you do in your spare time. It’s been increasing like that on a direct surge in the last year.”

Stephen Kay, the head of the district attorney’s Central District complaint division, said he does not think prosecutors “are going to make their cases suffer” because of the added volume, “but I think they’re going to suffer. . . . You’re going to find people stressed out on the job.”

(One prosecutor, concluding that narcotics prosecution is failing to make a dent, wrote Reiner a memo two months ago flatly proposing that the sale of heroin, cocaine and marijuana be legalized.

(Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Chrystie, a 19-year veteran who specializes in training police in search-and-seizure laws, contended that if the drugs were decriminalized, law enforcement would be free to use its resources to fight other kinds of crimes and prosecutors’ caseloads would be cut in half.)

Drug arrests have mushroomed as police responded to public complaints about uncontrolled street-corner drug dealing in many communities.

Los Angeles Police Department narcotics arrests rose 15% in both 1984 and 1985 and through September were up 21% over last year’s pace. Throughout Los Angeles County last year, cocaine and heroin arrests rose 37.9% and marijuana arrests were up 19.6%.

The prime vehicle police have used is the “street sweep,” employing task forces capable of making huge numbers of quick arrests by purchasing drugs with marked money.

A three-day citywide LAPD sweep netted 280 suspects last November, and another one in June resulted in the arrest of 842 people. In Long Beach, city officials created a task force that made more than 900 arrests during the last two months, including nearly 400 for drug-related felonies.

For the last two years, the LAPD deployed a 32-man task force in South Los Angeles in an effort to stem cocaine sales. The task force was recently disbanded in favor of a new, larger team being formed to combat narcotics and gang activity in the Newton Division, an industrial and residential area that includes the city’s produce and trucking centers. It is also beset by some of the city’s most violent gang and drug activity.

Prosecutors believe that the mushrooming sale of “crack” is not only producing more traffickers but leading to more incidents of robbery and assault because users more quickly reach a stage of addiction and desperation for money. That, in turn, creates additional criminal cases.

Dist. Atty. Reiner has proposed converting some criminal courts into special “narcotics courts” that would be devoted to cases involving street dealers.

Reiner has also proposed that other courts be used exclusively for probation violation hearings. It is far quicker to jail a suspected drug dealer if he has a previous arrest record and it can be proven that his latest arrest involved activity that violated a condition of probation, the district attorney said.

However, Supervising Criminal Courts Judge Aurelio Munoz said the court has traditionally opposed specialized courts “because it takes away our flexibility.”

One approach court officials have employed is the creation of several night criminal courts, open until 11 p.m., in an effort to get more use out of courtrooms.

Most Important Statistic

The most important statistic in the criminal justice system is the fact that about 90% of all defendants plead guilty rather than go to trial. Cases from the recent narcotics sweeps are producing an even higher rate of guilty pleas because of the open-and-shut nature of sales made to undercover police officers.

However, even cases that end in a guilty plea require manpower of both judges and prosecutors. Often, a defendant does not enter that plea until after his preliminary hearing.

To save time, Van Nuys prosecutor Carroll said his attorneys have been able to convince many defense lawyers and public defenders to enter guilty pleas earlier in the process.

Officials of other components of the criminal justice system say the prospect of higher narcotics arrests has them worried.

“I didn’t think it was going to be as great as it has been,” said county Public Defender Wilbur F. Littlefield. His staff’s flexibility, Littlefield said, “is about ready to bust.”

James Painter, chief of the Sheriff Department’s Custody Division, is beyond that point. Custodial facilities built for 12,312 prisoners were holding 19,958 last week and forcing jail officials to move thousands of men each day simply to “balance” the system.

Narcotics Arrests: Between them, the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s departments will make between 60,000 and 70,000 narcotics arrests this year. The pace of arrests in LAPD territory has risen much faster, climbing 15% in both 1984 and 1985 and by 21% this year, according to statistics compiled through September. Arrests of cocaine and heroin users are climbing the most drastically. According to the state attorney general’s office, 27,852 arrests involving heroin or cocaine were made in Los Angeles County last year, a 37.9% increase over 1984. In the territory patrolled by the county Sheriff’s Department, the monthly average of arrests for marijuana, heroin and PCP was down 27% through July but the average number of cocaine arrests was up 35%.

Criminal Filings: The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed 56,170 felony complaints in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 24.2% more than the previous year and a 37% jump over two years. The D.A.’s office does not keep a countywide total of narcotics cases filed. However, in the Central District, which covers about 40% of the county, narcotics filings were up 20% through September and earlier this year were as much as 36% ahead of the 1985 pace.

Judges: When Los Angeles County was allocated 25 Superior Court judge positions by the Legislature in 1980, it brought the county’s total to 196. Ten more judicial positions were approved the next year, but since then the total has risen by only 8.7%, to 224, who are roughly divided between criminal and civil courtrooms. Another 54 Superior Court commissioners handle a variety of family, civil and criminal cases. Court officials this year said they needed about 40 more judges simply to keep the county’s civil case backlog from increasing. However, no extra judges were approved. A bill to authorize 28 more Superior Court judges was killed in what legislative observers described as a political fight between Democrats and Gov. George Deukmejian.

Prosecutors: The Board of Supervisors approved an 18% budget increase for the district attorney’s office two years ago, but granted far smaller increases in subsequent years. As a result, the number of attorneys hired by the D.A.’s office increased by only 6.2% in 1985 and 4.6% this year, to a total of 746. Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner this spring told the Board of Supervisors that he wanted to create a team of at least a dozen lawyers to concentrate full time on prosecuting street drug dealers, but now says the staff increases he was granted were not sufficient to do this.