Judges Split on Status of Vista Court Changes : Justice: Decision is postponed after a tie vote on keeping disputed system designed to speed justice.

Judges in the Vista Municipal Court couldn’t decide Tuesday whether to continue a yearlong practice of assigning six judges to hear all misdemeanor criminal cases, from arraignment through sentencing, as a way of making the overworked courts more efficient.

Of the 11 Municipal Court judges, five wanted to continue the so-called “vertical case management,” and five wanted to return to the more traditional master-calendar form of handling misdemeanor cases, said Presiding Judge David Ryan.

Since the vote was tied, and the 11th judge was sick, the group decided to take the matter up again when it meets Dec. 19.

Ryan said he believes the absent judge favors continuing the new vertical case management.

At issue is how the Vista judges--who, according to the state’s Judicial Council are the most overworked in the state among courts with 11 or more judges--can streamline their administration of justice.

In most courts in California, a misdemeanor criminal suspect is first arraigned in the courtroom of the presiding judge, who sets the entire court’s master calendar and assigns the case to one of the six judges who will ultimately hear the trial.

The case is then sent to a pretrial judge, who tries to elicit a plea bargain satisfactory both to the district attorney’s office and the defense attorney.

If a plea bargain isn’t struck, the matter is then assigned to the judge who is next available to handle a trial.

Supporters of that traditional system--including deputy district attorneys and many private defense attorneys--say the system was streamlined because one judge specialized in arraignments and setting the overall calendar and another judge focused exclusively on trying to bring both sides together with plea-bargain agreements that negated the need for time-consuming jury trials.

But the Vista judges voted, 6 to 5, last year to give vertical case management a try, saying it might prove more efficient in the long run for one judge to handle everything from arraignment to pretrial plea bargains to the trial itself, and sentencing.

The thought was that, with one judge handling the entire case from the beginning, he would become more familiar with it and be in a better position to work out plea bargains, Ryan said. “Each (of the misdemeanor criminal judges) became a courthouse onto himself,” he said, because each defendant was assigned a judge immediately, based on the initial of his last name, and would, in theory, always appear before that same judge as the case progressed through the system.

But critics said the system hasn’t proven to be that efficient, and that some statistical studies of cases in Vista show that vertical case management has not been successful in reducing the number of jury trials, which was one of its goals.

The district attorney’s office complained that, since its prosecutors specialize in different aspects of the law, some of its deputies had to be in different courts at the same time to handle their particular aspect of different cases.

In contrast, the public defender’s office simply assigns two defense attorneys to each of the six criminal courtrooms, essentially making it his office and handling every indigent case assigned to that courtroom.

Ryan said that Tuesday’s balloting among judges was done in secret and that, for the most part, he doesn’t know how individual judges voted.

“But I think that some judges who previously were opposed to vertical case management now support it--and some who initially supported it now oppose it,” Ryan said.