Reluctant Judges Agree to Continue Night Court Hours

Under pressure from the county Board of Supervisors, the executive committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court reversed itself Monday and agreed to allow the highly regarded night court experiment to continue for up to two years.

But Presiding Judge Jack E. Goertzen made it clear that the judges remain opposed to night court, and still believe that statistics used to demonstrate the success of the experiment have been erroneously interpreted.

Goertzen, while denying that the supervisors had forced the judges to keep night court going, said in an interview: “There’s no question that the Board of Supervisors felt a sense of urgency on this matter. We were willing to take another look because of the urgency they felt.”

At a news conference before the court’s executive committee voted, Supervisor Mike Antonovich described a “candid and frank discussion” he and Supervisor Ed Edelman had last week with Goertzen, former Presiding Judge Thomas T. Johnson, Assistant Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne, County Clerk and Executive Officer Frank S. Zolin and Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz, who supervises felony trials.

Antonovich implied that the judges were told that if they remained intransigent on night court--or refused to substitute some equivalent, such as Saturday sessions--the supervisors, who control the court budget, might be reluctant to add new judges in the future or build new court buildings.

“If we’re going to have new judges and additional facilities, we’re going to have to utilize to the fullest the current facilities that we have already constructed, and also be creative in work hours,” Antonovich said.

After the vote, Antonovich issued a statement saying that he is “pleased” that his session with the judges had been “productive.”

Launched on a trial basis last February, the project split three Superior Courts and one Municipal Court in the downtown Criminal Courts building into back-to-back sessions--one beginning at 7 a.m., and the other at 3:30 p.m.--in order to test whether backlog and jail overcrowding could be reduced.

The program has drawn strong praise from Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Public Defender Wilbur F. Littlefield, George W. Trammell, presiding judge of the Municipal Court, and Sheriff Sherman Block.

A task force study showed that from April through October, the courts in the experiment had disposed of twice as many cases as had been anticipated. Moreover, cases took an average of 10.7 fewer days to adjudicate than cases in comparable day courts, resulting in a saving of 114 jail beds.

The task force figures also showed that the three split-session felony courts compared favorably when their productivity was measured against six regular felony courts chosen by the judges.

Even so, the Superior Court’s executive committee last month decided to terminate the program June 30, saying its own oversight committee had concluded that the system was ineffective.

The judges say the task force’s statistics are misleading because they do not reflect the time lost in the early-morning courtrooms because of late starts or the fact that the most complex cases are not handled in night court.

In a memorandum prepared for Goertzen on Friday, Zolin cited “the lightweight nature of the caseload and the higher percentage of in-custody defendants, which tends to result in a higher proportion of guilty pleas at an early point in time.”

After the 17 judges on the executive committee voted, Goertzen issued a statement saying that from now on the program would be evaluated on a quarterly basis, with progress reports that detail among other things “the limitations of split court operations.”

Despite his opposition, Goertzen said the judges will do everything they can to make the night court experiment work. “We are not going to try to torpedo this program,” he said. “If we had wanted to torpedo it, we could have done it in the beginning.”

Goertzen said he believes the problem of the courtroom shortage could be resolved by finding another location for the 15 Dependency Courts that have been housed in the Criminal Courts Building since 1978.

Court administrators have long said it is wrong to have courts that deal with neglected, abused and abandoned children in a building intended for criminal trials. Several other sites have been proposed, both downtown and on the Eastside.