Drug Overdose Wastes Courts

As a group, chief justices are more inclined to understate than exaggerate. So California now has more than enough warning--not just from one top jurist but from two--that drug cases are threatening to swamp the federal and state justice systems.

The latest warning is from Malcolm M. Lucas, chief justice of the state Supreme Court, who said Monday that California’s trial courts “are close to foundering” in a flood of drug cases. And Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist recently said roughly the same thing about the federal court system.

But the politics of drug control as they are practiced these days make it certain that the situation will get worse before it gets better, that legislators will plow a great deal more barren ground before they discover that there are no easy answers to drugs.

Lucas told a joint session of the California Legislature that courts should be among the last resorts in the fight against drugs, something to which people turn after they have tried education, treatment, early intervention and research. Lucas is absolutely correct, but such wise counsel is considered “soft” stuff, and politicians are more comfortable sounding tough on drugs.

Why are drug cases soaring? One reason is that legislators love to rattle missiles on drugs and keep stipulating longer prison terms, stripping judges of the right to issue lighter sentences if defendants plead guilty. More defendants choose a full trial because a defendant must serve the same time for a guilty plea as for a conviction, and at least there is a chance of beating the case in court.

Yet in both Washington and Sacramento, the emphasis is still on more police, more prisons and tougher sentences. Bills calling for longer prison terms keep getting introduced and passed, because challengers can use nay votes as weapons in the next election.

But all such easy answers come to no good. Lucas warned Monday that drug cases are crowding out important civil cases involving “the environment, civil rights, the economy and other important aspects of our lives,” because there are not enough judges or courtrooms to try both and criminal cases have priority.

So far, policy makers in both Washington and Sacramento seem to have it in mind that taxpayers are happy to pay for prisons but not for new courtrooms. The politicians should not count on it, now that the voters have been given fair warning not just by one chief justice but by two.