Too Swift Justice : With Only 1 Jurist on Bench, Simi Court Measures Cases in Seconds

At exactly 8:30 a.m. on a recent weekday, a sheriff’s deputy unlocked the wood-and-glass doors to Simi Valley’s only courtroom.

In walked nearly 90 defendants. They had come for their day in court.

It was time to answer charges that they had run stop signs, broken the speed limit, driven while drunk or failed to show up for earlier court dates.

For many, the day in court lasted less than 90 seconds. For some, it was put off for a week or more or transferred to the main courthouse in Ventura.

According to court officials, this kind of justice is inconvenient, overly swift, occasionally unfair--and a too-common side effect of the way the Simi Valley Courthouse is staffed.

By noon, Municipal Commissioner John V. Paventi had arraigned all the defendants, accepting guilty pleas and fines from some and not-guilty pleas and trial requests from the rest.

By mid-afternoon Paventi had grabbed a sandwich and arraigned nearly two dozen more people on various charges.

He had also started presiding over trials.

* An anxious father spread maps on a blackboard in an unsuccessful attempt to defend himself against a ticket for driving 41 m.p.h. in a 25-m.p.h. zone while rushing to his son’s graduation. Paventi found him guilty and fined him $74.

* A couple sued a rug-cleaning company, claiming that its employees stole a $1,500 necklace while cleaning their bedroom. Paventi said he would review their claim and rule on it later.

* A man laid brick tiles on a courtroom table as part of an attempt to recover more than $2,000 that he said he spent to repair a poorly installed floor. Again, Paventi said he would rule later.

It was another routinely busy day in a court that is getting busier by the year. As the population of eastern Ventura County grows, so does the caseload in the Simi Valley Courthouse, Paventi said.

“When I started as commissioner here on Oct. 1 of 1988, we had a total of about 1,700 cases a month,” he said. “Now we’re averaging 1,900 a month.”

Paventi works the Simi courthouse Monday through Wednesday and handles arraignments in the Ventura courthouse on Thursday and Friday. But that may change.

Presiding Municipal Judge Lee E. Cooper Jr. said the Municipal Court judges plan to switch Paventi to working five days a week in Simi Valley once the new courthouse opens there in January.

The modern two-story building has five courtrooms. But the Legislature so far has ignored repeated requests from Ventura County for additional judgeships that would help staff it.

So Paventi likely will be the only one permanently assigned to the Simi Valley Courthouse, although court officials might reassign a judge to work there temporarily to reduce the backlog, Cooper said.

“The complaint I hear most often is the judge there does not spend a lot of time on any given case, but that’s true in all our courtrooms,” Cooper said.

The five-day schedule will let Paventi increase the time he can give to each case, but it will not be enough to handle the growing caseload for long, Cooper said.

And it will not remove the built-in handicaps that are hobbling the Simi court.

Because Paventi is a commissioner rather than a judge, he is not empowered to dismiss cases without the consent of both the prosecutor and the defense attorney.

Because the district attorney does not have any deputies working at the courthouse, any defendant who wants to get the charges against him reduced or modified before going to trial must take his case to the Ventura court.

And any defendant who wants a public defender must either set a court date for Wednesday--the only day when the public defender is present at the Simi Valley Courthouse--or take the case to the Ventura courthouse, where public defenders are on duty every day.

“The lack of a public defender and a district attorney staffing the courtroom full time causes many cases to be set for trial that wouldn’t normally be set,” Paventi said. “It causes an inability to dismiss cases that might be improperly filed, and it also causes many people to simply plead guilty to avoid another appearance, because they don’t want to be troubled with coming back on a simple traffic ticket.”

Assistant Sheriff Oscar Fuller said there is another problem with the Simi Valley Courthouse: Deputies who arrest eastern Ventura County residents on suspicion of misdemeanors must drive to Ventura to get the district attorney’s approval on a criminal complaint, then return the papers to Simi Valley in time for arraignment.

“There’s deadlines set by the court. You have to file these by 11 a.m. . . . and it’s a tricky thing to do because it’s a 35-minute drive to Simi,” Fuller said. “It gets hairy sometimes to meet the deadlines because you have to charge someone within 72 hours of the arrest.”

And because the Simi Valley Courthouse is so far from Ventura and open only three days a week, deputies often must release people and rearrest them once they get the criminal complaints approved.

“It’s really like a poor stepchild out here,” said Assistant Public Defender Jean L. Farley, who handled more than two dozen cases in two hours on a recent Wednesday.

Without a deputy district attorney present, criminal complaints cannot be modified, guilty pleas sometimes cannot be arrived at, and as a result, many cases that could have ended in Simi Valley are transferred to the Ventura courthouse, Farley said.

“It’s just extremely difficult for people to feel as though they’ve had their day in court when they are here,” she said. “There is a commissioner operating here who really does not have the authority to do many of the things that would be done by a judge, such as dismiss counts.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward F. Brodie, who supervises misdemeanor prosecutors, said his office does not have the staff to put a deputy in the Simi Valley Courthouse.

“We’d love to put somebody out there if we had the staff to do it,” Brodie said. “It’s just a manpower problem. East county is growing, and eventually I could envision having staff out there. But there remains another problem: We’re just barely keeping up with the cases in Ventura.”