County Acts to Speed Up Its Criminal Court System

Under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles County has agreed to try to speed up its criminal court system to help reduce the amount of time suspects must wait in jail before their trials.

Under a 90-day pilot program, the Superior Court system will make dozens of civil courtrooms available for criminal trials and introduce three special courts for non-jury trials, which can be conducted more rapidly.

The plan also involves informal pledges by the county’s judges, prosecutors and public defenders to try to cut down on continuances, which often delay trials for months. Details of the plan are to be announced by Superior Court officials later this week.

However, those who thrashed out the plan said its impact will depend in large part on the enthusiasm of lawyers and judges to change their sometimes sluggish habits. Executives of the county’s court system have in the past made independent procedural changes. But the new program is being implemented in response to demands from the ACLU, which for years has contended that the county’s jail facilities are so crowded that long-term incarceration can amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

Several county officials said the changes are being made because of the ACLU’s threat to seek a federal contempt-of-court order against dozens of county executives and judges. A fast-rising jail population has made it impossible for the county to meet some of the conditions set down by a federal judge who ruled in favor of the ACLU in a 13-year-old lawsuit concerning jail overcrowding.

The issue of how quickly an inmate’s case comes to trial is significant because an estimated 60% of the 22,000 prisoners in the county’s eight facilities have yet to be sentenced. They are waiting for their cases to be resolved in court. Many of those sentenced are sent to state prison.

The ACLU sued the county over poor jail conditions in 1974. In 1979, U.S. District Judge William P. Gray ruled in favor of the ACLU, ordering the county to meet several minimum standards involving meals, clean clothes, exercise and the guarantee of a bed.

In recent years, the county fell out of compliance with Gray’s order. A 1986 compromise to hold the population of the largest facility, the downtown Central Jail, to 6,800 inmates worked for only a few months. About 8,600 prisoners are now housed there.

John Hagar, a lawyer who represents the ACLU in its jail litigation, said in an interview that he believes that the county Sheriff’s Department, which oversees the jail, has “exercised almost every possible option” to create livable conditions inside its jail facilities.

But the county has not tried as hard to provide an equally efficient court system, Hagar said. He contended that the county has not provided a sufficient number of criminal courts, violating the state law requiring that criminal cases receive priority over civil cases. In addition, Hagar said, “there’s a policy in the criminal courts of extreme liberality toward continuances and delays,” both on the part of judges and lawyers.

The county plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on thousands of new jail beds in the next several years, but that is not expected to catch up with the surging jail population, fueled largely by rising narcotics prosecutions.

Under the new program, to begin July 15, the Superior Court system will:

- Convert three civil courts--one downtown, one in Pasadena and one in Compton--into criminal courts designed specifically for cases in which the defendant waives his or her right to a jury trial.

These so-called “waiver courts” will attempt to quickly resolve cases in which the legal issues are few or fairly clear-cut, such as a question of whether a drug suspect is guilty of selling or merely of possession. In some cases, a transcript of the defendant’s preliminary hearing may provide the judge with most of the information needed to make a ruling.

- Another 43 civil courts--half of them downtown, the other half at various branch court complexes--will be designated to absorb the overload from the existing criminal courts, and will be made available for criminal cases as needed.

Currently, of the Superior Court’s 278 courts, 85 are designated for criminal and 86 are designated for civil matters. The remaining courts are set aside for juvenile, family law, probate and other specialized fields.

- The county Probation Department will attempt to cut the amount of time required to prepare a pre-sentencing report on each convicted suspect to three weeks from the current four weeks.

Frank Zolin, executive officer of the Superior Court, said judges are willing to make the changes sought by the ACLU but said he doubts that the changes will make a long-term difference.

Judges believe “we are disposing of cases as fast as they come” and that “we can’t identify anything court-controlled that we can squeeze at this time,” Zolin said.

Zolin said the use of the additional civil courts will quickly make one significant change. Currently, there are about 120 criminal cases that are “trailing”--not yet scheduled for trial even though the maximum waiting time, 60 days from the time charges were filed, has passed.

Beginning July 15, Zolin said, those cases will be sent to the newly available civil courts and the backlog of “trailing” cases should be wiped out within a few weeks. After that, Zolin said, most of those extra courts should remain primarily available for civil cases. Thus the county’s civil court backlog--which delays the average civil suit from coming to trial for 3 1/2 years--should not be made worse, he said.

But Hagar and other supporters of the changes said recent negotiations on the ACLU’s demands have given all segments of the criminal justice system the message that cases must be moved more quickly.

Can Cut Jail Population

Hagar said he believes that if the program is used for six months, the county’s jail population could be cut “by a couple of thousand beds,” a figure of about 8%. James Painter, chief of the sheriff’s custody division, declined to make a specific estimate but said that at worst the changes will keep the jail population from increasing further.

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who in 1985 proposed changes similar to the ACLU’s, without success, said he believes that a sense of urgency will trickle down to his staff and other departments.

“The idea that the first trial date (set by a judge) is not supposed to be taken seriously by anybody in the system is deeply ingrained,” Reiner said. “The No. 1 one problem is not volume, it’s attitude. The attitude is--and this is by everybody, including our people--that it’s supposed to take this long (to get a case to trial). . . . That is something that is going to be turned around. . . . There is just a realization that we are approaching gridlock.”

David Meyer, chief of trials for the public defender’s office, which represents many of the defendants who cannot afford bail and are confined to jail while awaiting trial, said deputy public defenders will be willing to recommend to their clients in appropriate cases that they use the new “waiver courts.”

“We think that (faster) approach will handle a lot of cases,” Meyer said. “But we’re not going to force our lawyers to use it. . . . We’re not getting on any railroads.”

Gerald Kaufman, who heads the Philadelphia-based National Jail and Prison Overcrowding Project, said attempts to solve jail overcrowding by speeding up court processes are difficult because they usually involve forcing some concessions from judges or prosecutors.

“They don’t want to be constrained,” he said. “They normally will say to the county, ‘Just build more jails.’ ”

In this case, however, the county’s past inability to control its jail population gave the ACLU’s exceptionally strong leverage, according to one criminal justice official close to the negotiations.

“The ACLU had us by the short hairs,” he said.