Court Crunch Worsens as O.C. Drug Cases Rise

The 60-day deadline for putting on trial three men accused of selling cocaine was just hours away, and Phillip Cox, presiding judge of the Orange County Superior Court, faced a dilemma:

Find--seemingly out of thin air--a judge, jury, and courtroom for the trial or let the men walk away free under state law guaranteeing defendants a speedy trial.

Cox, determined that the massive backlog of cases in the understaffed court would not force him to dismiss this case, did an unusual thing that day a month ago. With his pool of potential jurors drained to zero in the post-Labor Day crunch, Cox ordered bailiffs to comb the crowds in the courthouse lobby and coffee-sippers in the cafeteria for potential jurors.

One woman who met the prerequisites (Orange County resident, a U.S. citizen, 18 years or older, breathing) was led by bailiffs to the jury room from the cafeteria with a dish of Jell-O still in her hand.

And Cox, for the first time in his two years as chief judge, abandoned his other duties to hear the case himself. The trial began just under the wire, exactly 60 days from the date of arraignment.

“It was try ‘em or let ‘em go, and I sure wasn’t going to do that,” Cox said.

The scenario dramatized the effects of the overload of cases in Orange County, which has threatened to slow the court system to a crawl.

“The drug situation is getting worse, and that load of cases means it’s just going to take more and more to run the courts,” Cox said. “We just don’t have the judges or the resources to do it.”

When choices must be made, criminal cases take precedence over civil ones in court, meaning that disputes over who is going to get the kids, or who is going to pay for the smashed car and the hospital bills, can sometimes lag five years before they are heard at trial.

As a result, the local bar is suing the state, claiming that Orange County has gotten short shrift in the number of judges it is assigned.

The Superior Court now has 52 judges, plus 12 commissioners acting in a judicial capacity, to handle more than 60,000 civil and criminal cases a year. But several slots remain unfilled by the state. Three years ago, a state judicial panel that assesses the workloads of the courts estimated that Orange County should have at least 72 judges.

‘Failure of Justice’

The court crunch, bar officials maintain, has produced “a failure of justice” and may even have had a “chilling effect,” dissuading some from going to court.

“This is really a serious concern and a real frustration for the lawyers,” said Michael Gazin, president of the Orange County Bar Assn. “It makes it very difficult to plan your case when you don’t know when you’re going to have to be ready in court or when you’re going to have to call your witnesses.” Routinely, Gazin said, lawyers and clients scheduled for trial wait for days and weeks for an available courtroom.

And with three more judges scheduled to leave the bench in coming weeks, officials say the situation is bound to get worse.

It is so bad now, Cox said, that today for the first time he might have to pull some judges off a special court panel and assign them to criminal cases.

That panel, created in 1988 as a pilot program for California counties with heavy civil backlogs, is designed to allow one judge to speed a case through to its conclusion and avoid the delays and pitfalls that occur when a case is bounced from one judge to another.

By most accounts, the panel has worked even beyond expectation, receiving accolades in a state study for its “remarkable” success. About four in five of the cases heard by the panel were completed within a year of filing, contrasted with just one in five for other Orange County cases.

But with criminal cases taking precedence, Cox said he may have no choice but to take judges from the panel.

“I’m really afraid that this is just the first move toward shutting down the civil courts,” he said.

A Common Experience

The Orange County experience is common to many metropolitan areas in the state. San Diego went so far earlier this year as to block the start of all civil trials for a time.

The most influential factor in the current crunch, court officials say, is drugs. The daily stream of drug offenders large and small are now estimated to make up more than half of the criminal cases coming into the courts.

Some Orange County prosecutors maintain that the pressing need to speed cases through the system has fostered a leniency toward drug dealers, prompting some judges to settle cases through pleas and offer light sentences rather than expend valuable court time in trial.

“Even as we in law enforcement are arresting more people with larger quantities (of drugs), the sentences go down,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carl W. Armbrust, who heads the drug enforcement unit. “And that’s what really irritates me.”

Superior Court judges vehemently deny the charge, saying that a defendant’s history and the severity of the crime determine treatment in the courts. But some officials acknowledge that the court crunch is a realistic consideration.

Alan Slater, executive officer for the Superior Court, points out that even a slight increase in the criminal cases that must be tried would mean that about half the civil cases could not be heard.

Overall, criminal cases in the Santa Ana-based Superior Court have increased a whopping 83% in the past five years, from 2,957 felony cases in 1984 to a projected 5,421 in 1989.

Civil Lawsuits Climb 13%

At the same time, civil lawsuits have climbed 13%, from 51,224 in 1984 to 57,931 projected this year, spurred mostly by an increase in personal injury claims.

Increasingly, people are resorting to alternative remedies outside the traditional courts, such as the expedited trial panel or private mediation services.

The space shortage at the courthouse will be eased somewhat in 1991, when a new courthouse is due to open for the juvenile, probate and family law division.

But the problem at the main courthouse remains an imposing one, court officials say, best captured by the scene last month of court marshals peeking around corridors for potential jurors.

Defense lawyers in that ongoing drug trial attacked the extraordinary maneuver as patently illegal, charging that jurors were essentially “Shanghaied into service” with little regard for protocol.

Debra Zehner, who was on vacation that week, was just tagging along with a friend to get some legal documents at the courthouse when she was asked to serve as a potential juror.

“I never expected that. I didn’t really want to, but they said it was an emergency, so I went,” Zehner said.

Patrick Hearn, assistant executive officer for the court, warned that there may be more such emergencies.

“The problems we’re seeing have all the signs of a trend. It’s a snowballing, mushrooming effect that’s hitting us now.”