Judge Prompts County Action to Ease Crowding in Court Holding Cells

County officials took immediate measures Friday to ease severe overcrowding in Los Angeles Municipal Court holding cells, which were so packed Thursday that one high-ranking public defender likened conditions in one cell to those in a concentration camp.

At an early morning meeting, Presiding Municipal Judge George W. Trammell reached an agreement with the county marshal’s office that no more than 80 prisoners be housed at one time in the two holding cells at the arraignment court in the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

On Thursday, when a record number of prisoners--439--were crammed into the courthouse, 180 of them were placed in the two arraignment court cells, one of which had a stopped-up toilet that spewed human excrement on the floor, according to David Meyer, chief of trials for the public defender’s office. The larger of the two cells is about 20 feet square.

Trammell also created a task force at an afternoon session with representatives of the district attorney’s office, the public defender’s office, the marshal’s office, the Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department to study possible solutions to the problem.

Members of the task force will meet again March 5, Trammell said, to report on such options as operating a night court for felony arraignments or opening a second day court in an existing courtroom.

“I think we made some headway; we got people talking; we now have people sensitized,” Trammell said after the session.

Thursday’s conditions were labeled “very, very unusual” by Trammell, who blamed it on a crammed court schedule and backlog of cases resulting from the holiday weekend and a major police narcotics sweep.

Meyer, however, told reporters that the conditions were “no aberration, but simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“It was like a concentration camp,” he said. “The smell was as if you went into a cesspool. . . . People were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-front, wall-to-wall.”

Still, Meyer called Friday’s meeting a positive step. “There was a general recognition,” he said, “that this is not a problem that arises because of the fault of anyone.”

Overcrowding has increased as arrests and the number of cases filed by the district attorney’s office rise significantly. In the past week, a record 400 felony narcotics cases alone were filed, according to Stephen R. Kay, head deputy of the district attorney’s complaint filing division.

In 1986, Kay said, 9,325 narcotics felony cases were filed--nearly twice the 4,803 filed in 1984--in the Central Division.

“There will be no let-up in the arrests or filings,” Kay added. “If the police bring us a decent case, we’re going to file.”