County OKs $25-Million Plan to Ease Jail Crowding

Under intense pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union to ease jail overcrowding, Los Angeles County agreed Tuesday to spend $25 million more annually, and state courts in Los Angeles agreed to make substantial procedural changes, to reduce the time it takes to settle criminal cases.

Key features of the plan include 12 more judges assigned to hear criminal matters in Superior Court, about 35 additional deputy district attorneys and about 35 public defenders, and enforcement of a widely ignored state law that would make continuances more difficult to obtain.

The plan would also seek to ease jail overcrowding by having Municipal Court judges conduct Superior Court arraignments immediately after preliminary hearings. At present, defendant inmates ordered to stand trial in Superior Court must wait in jail two weeks before making what is usually a perfunctory court appearance for their arraignment.

The plan also calls for a pilot project in Municipal Court to encourage the taking of guilty pleas even before a preliminary hearing in cases where the criminal has been caught red-handed. District attorney’s statistics indicate that 30% of defendant inmates plead guilty at their preliminary hearings. The pilot project would attempt to save jail beds by getting those inmates to plead guilty even earlier.

Felony defendants would be referred to a special Municipal Court to explore the possibility of a guilty plea a few days after initial arraignments in Municipal Court.

The far-reaching agreement, hammered out in a series of late-night negotiating sessions between county and state court officials and approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors, represents the county’s effort to avoid enforcement of federal court orders in the ACLU’s longstanding jail crowding lawsuit against the county.

The county’s jail population has skyrocketed from 8,000 to more than 22,000 in less than a decade. The federal court orders, set to go into effect in the next two months, would limit the county’s largest jail, Men’s Central in downtown Los Angeles, to 110% of its rated capacity--probably triggering early release of some convicts--and would require the sheriff to give each inmate a seat while waiting for a bus to court.

The seemingly innocuous seating requirement was expected to cause widespread disruption in state court schedules because, in order to provide seats for each inmate, the sheriff would have to bus inmates to court in shifts.

U.S. District Judge William P. Gray issued those orders in 1979 when the ACLU first won its jail overcrowding suit against the county. But he held them in abeyance for years as the ACLU worked cooperatively with county officials to ease crowding.

Gray threatened to enforce them at the ACLU’s behest last month, however, when the civil liberties group complained that while county officials had cooperated, the Superior Court had not.

Tuesday’s action by the supervisors was expected to head off enforcement. It was approved by John Hagar, the ACLU’s attorney in the jail overcrowding suit, who was in San Francisco but was apprised of developments by telephone, according to Assistant County Counsel Frederick R. Bennett.

Bennett said he expects that he and Hagar will fly to New York City next week to present the agreement to Gray for his approval as a satisfactory attempt to reduce jail overcrowding. Gray, who normally sits in Los Angeles, is on temporary assignment in New York.

In a letter to supervisors, county Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon said the agreement “should allow the recision of the federal court order for at least six months” before overcrowding becomes acute.

But others appeared even more optimistic.

“We are reasonably confident we can make a substantial and significant impact in jail overcrowding by getting most of our cases resolved much earlier than they are currently being resolved,” said one of those involved in negotiating the agreement, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti.

“Almost all of the program revolves around the implementation of what I think are more efficient ways of doing business at our end of the felony process--that is the beginning end,” said Los Angeles Municipal Court Presiding Judge George W. Trammell, who was credited by fellow negotiators with playing the key role in arriving at a settlement.

Each “instant arraignment” after a preliminary hearing will save 15 jail days, Trammell noted. Each guilty plea before a preliminary hearing could save about seven days.

Trammell agreed to lend nine Municipal Court judges to the Superior Court to hear criminal cases.

The Superior Court agreed to provide three more of its own judges to hear criminal cases full time. The Superior Court has been reluctant to provide more judges to hear criminal cases because of its enormous civil backlog.

In an extraordinary action last week, the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. sued the Superior Court and the government agencies that fund it for failing to make enough judges and courtrooms available to try civil cases within five years of their being filed.

To help out, the agreement calls for the county to fund 15 retired Superior Court judges to hear civil cases.

The county also promised to continue to fund a program set to lapse in January in which lawyers act as arbitrators to try to settle civil disputes involving less than $25,000.

Frank Zolin, executive officer of the Los Angeles Superior Court, lauded the willingness of supervisors to provide funds totaling $7.5 million for the rest of this year and $25.3 million for next year.

“That’s a very substantial allocation of additional resources,” Zolin said.

Dixon said that represents approximately a 10% increase in county expenditures for Superior Court criminal proceedings.

One potentially far-reaching change that Dixon said supervisors insisted upon was court agreement to enforce a widely ignored state law discouraging pretrial delays. The law requires that requests for continuances be made in writing, by formal motion, and that judges state their reasons for granting them publicly.

Although state law gives defendants the right to demand a trial within 60 days of arraignment, continuances are so common that more than 1,000 inmates have been waiting in jail at least six months for their trials, the ACLU has said.

The supervisors voted 3 to 1 to adopt the proposed settlement. With Supervisor Kenneth Hahn absent, only Supervisor Pete Schabarum opposed it, saying it didn’t go far enough.

“All you are doing is buying another six months,” Schabarum said. “We’ll be back to the drawing board with everybody wringing their hands.”