Evidence Storage Overwhelming Courts

At the Orange County Superior Court evidence warehouse, mannequins that once represented murder victims stand shoulder to shoulder above boxes stuffed with bloody clothes from crimes decades old.

The room is sort of a museum of the macabre, a place where a bullet-riddled sofa cushion from a 1981 murder case sits near photographs of a shooting rampage by former postal carrier Richard Hilbun, who was convicted of two murders and seven attempted murders.

The warehouse, in the basement of an old Buffum’s department store in Santa Ana, is windowless and gloomy--and stacked to the rafters.

It is nearing capacity, like many in a state where courts have trouble storing artifacts from about 15,000 criminal and civil trials held each year.

California courts are taking desperate steps to deal with the overload. Photographs now substitute for drugs and firearms in many courtrooms. In some counties, including Orange, attorneys keep their own exhibits out of court, the overloaded evidence rooms no longer able to accommodate them.

“We would have definitely been out of room by now if we didn’t change our policy,” said Bill Cook, an evidence technician for Orange County Superior Court, which no longer stores bulky exhibits.

Courthouse evidence rooms have been portrayed in Hollywood as rooms filled with clues just waiting to solve crimes. But, for the most part, sensitive materials like blood spatters or fingerprints remain in the custody of police crime labs, not courthouse storage rooms.

Still, these evidence rooms can contain clues useful to prison inmates trying to prove their innocence or appellate lawyers looking to prove a point about a trial mistake. But long gone are the days when courts stored every piece of evidence from past trials.

In the 1970s, officials used a crane to place and later remove a 100-foot section of airplane wing--evidence in a civil lawsuit--in a Santa Ana courtroom. Now Cook won’t accept 4-foot poster boards that attorneys use to stress their case before a jury.

The exception is death penalty cases, in which all evidence is accepted and stored until the inmate is executed or cleared on appeal, court officials said.

At the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, officials said evidence storage has reached a crisis level, largely because of a court order prohibiting the destruction of old evidence.

A judge made the order in January, saying attorneys need time to determine which cases contain clothing or other materials containing DNA evidence that might be used to overturn wrongful convictions.

The court also is under order to preserve evidence from thousands of cases that could be linked to officers implicated in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division scandal.

“There’s no space. We have posters spilling over into the walkways,” said Ana Roldan, who supervises the evidence room in the basement of the Criminal Courts Building. “We’re looking for other storage outside of the building.”

Court officials are pleading with Los Angeles County prosecutors to refrain from using bulky charts, the kind Orange County court officials now refuse to hold. The Los Angeles court already refuses to warehouse drugs as evidence, accepting photographs instead. It sends firearms to the Sheriff’s Department to preserve.

“There’s some D.A.s that don’t like it . . . because it doesn’t have the same effect of actually touching and feeling it,” Roldan said.

“A picture doesn’t have the same effect as 50 kilos of cocaine.”

And now the Los Angeles court is considering dropping its decades-old practice of storing evidence from all of the county’s courts together in one room and instead will ask courthouses throughout the county to keep their own evidence.

“We have to do something,” Roldan said.

Some criminal defense attorneys said they are concerned about the steps courts are taking to deal with the storage crunch.

“The problem is you don’t know what you’re going to need until you need it,” said Richard Schwartzberg, a Santa Ana attorney who specializes in criminal appeals.

“Do you keep everything in the off chance you might need something? The answer is no. It’s just too expensive. What they’re doing is taking a calculated risk.”

Evidence storage is a problem statewide, for both courts and police departments, said Barbara Peters, a Simi Valley police evidence technician and president of the California Assn. for Property and Evidence.

“We’re stacked floor to ceiling,” said Mary Pilker, exhibits manager for Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland.

Alameda County court officials now refuse to store evidence from most civil trials, instructing attorneys to cart evidence back to their offices.

The evidence the court does keep is stored in small rooms on three floors of the Oakland courthouse. Pilker said she spends the bulk of her workday searching for evidence old enough to destroy, generally from cases in which all appeals have been exhausted.

“I’m trying to destroy [old evidence] and transfer the rest to the district attorney as fast as I can,” she said. “I have to be concerned about space.”

When she learns of a complex upcoming trial, Pilker said, she contacts the judge in advance and asks that photographs be substituted for bulky exhibits.

Such agreements are necessary because courts simply can’t afford to lease more space to warehouse trial exhibits, officials said. Orange County, for example, spends $14,000 per month for its storage space at the closed Buffum’s on Main Street in Santa Ana.

“The money it costs to house these exhibits is eventually passed on to the taxpayer,” said Carole Levitzky, a spokeswoman for Orange County Superior Court. “If it isn’t absolutely necessary for the court to preserve these exhibits, the court doesn’t have unlimited resources to store them.”