OH - Slow justice costs millions

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The trek through the courthouse is further slowed by several of the county's 33 trial judges, who routinely take twice as long as some of their colleagues to resolve criminal cases, adding to a costly backlog of jail inmates.

Court and jail records show that the county's slowest five judges alone have accounted for nearly 200,000 more inmate jail days over the past four years than their quickest five colleagues.

At $51 a day the price Cuyahoga County has been paying to house overflow prisoners elsewhere that quickly adds up to real money.

In fact, the county sheriff has spent nearly $18 million since 2000 to rent space in other county jails for prisoners he couldn't fit here.

During that same period, a Plain Dealer analysis shows, nearly half the felony cases filed in the county took six months or more from arrest to final disposition despite recommendations of the American Bar Association that only 2 percent of cases should take that long. One Cuyahoga County case in 10 takes a year or longer.

Speed is not the only measure of a court's effectiveness. In fact, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote in 1972, "The Constitution recognizes higher values than speed and efficiency."

But delays in the court system can be burdensome for poor defendants, maddening to prosecutors, frustrating for crime victims, unfair to the innocent and costly for taxpayers.

For example, prosecutors allowed Phillip Johnson to sit in the County Jail with no trial for nearly five months following his October 2002 arrest for drug possession. The case against Johnson, 46, who couldn't post a $250 bond, was eventually thrown out for taking too long. But not before taxpayers had paid to jail him for 144 days $7,300 worth at the going rate.

Records show that more than half of the jail's $57 million annual budget is spent housing prisoners, like Johnson, who have not yet been convicted of anything.

Millions could be saved if the court adopted reforms employed elsewhere.

In Hamilton County, for instance, court rules require prosecutors to indict defendants within 15 days of arrest 10 days if the accused is in jail.

But in Cuyahoga County, records for the last four years show that felony defendants who couldn't make bail spent an average of 32 days in the County Jail awaiting indictment. If the county were operating under Hamilton County's 10-day rule, it could be saving more than 50,000 inmate days a year at the County Jail, which recently was described by federal authorities as one of the most crowded in the country.

And taxpayers could be saving millions of dollars in actual expenditures each year if more Cuyahoga County judges agreed to manage their dockets with an eye to jail costs.

Last year alone, the sheriff spent $5.5 million sending misdemeanor inmates elsewhere, largely because the County Jail has been so jammed with pretrial defendants and probation violators.

That cost could be eliminated, sheriff's officials say, if the county's judges would limit the number of jailed defendants on their respective dockets to 40 or fewer at any given time.

For years, sheriff's officials have pleaded with the judges to meet that goal, sending weekly inmate head counts to each one as a reminder.

But while several judges have had no trouble meeting that standard, and records show that several others meet it more often than not, about half of the county's judges have averaged more than 40 jail inmates since 2002 in the sheriff's weekly reports.

Eight judges averaged 50 or more inmates during that period. And two judges Burt Griffin and Shirley Strickland Saffold averaged at least 60. Available records show that neither has even approached the sheriff's 40-inmate standard since the beginning of 2002.

Using the $51-a-day cost cited by the sheriff, cases assigned to Griffin and Saffold have accounted for a combined $11.5 million in jail costs since 2000 more than twice the combined total for colleagues William J. Coyne and Ronald Suster. Both Coyne and Suster have met the sheriff's standard with ease in every weekly report since 2002, according to records.

Judges, experts debate

merits of speedy courts

"A trial date should mean a trial date," Suster said, in explaining the brisk pace in his courtroom. "We try to maintain a pretty firm schedule."

Saffold declined to return phone calls seeking comment. But Griffin dismissed the statistical comparisons altogether. "Justice is the primary objective here," he said, adding that some court delays "contribute to justice" by making the system fairer.

True, courts are not designed for efficiency. And some legal scholars fear that too much emphasis on speed could detract from the sometimes-tedious pro cedures that make courts fair.

But speedier courts can offer more protection to the public, said Erik Luna, a University of Utah law professor. Courts that move faster reduce the chances that suspects free on bail will commit new crimes or skip their court dates, he said.

And the Constitution recognizes a defendant's right to a speedy trial as well.

The most common threat to that ideal in Cuyahoga County's system comes at the beginning. Over the past four years, the county's four grand juries typically have taken about 52 days from the date of arrest to bring a felony indictment, according to an analysis of court records since 2000.

That's 35 days longer than in Lucas County, and 17 days more than in Ohio's second-largest county, Franklin.

By contrast, according to court records, Hamilton County grand juries typically return indictments in just nine days.

In part, prosecutors say, that's a function of size.

With more than 16,000 indictments annually, Cuyahoga County's four grand juries handle far more felonies than any other court in the state. Hamilton County's two grand juries review roughly one-third of Cuyahoga's caseload.

But Hamilton County is more efficient for other reasons as well. Lawyers there are appointed for poor defendants within 48 hours of arrest, officials say, making it easier to weed out minor cases before they clog up the system.

In Cuyahoga County, the process of appointing attorneys and haggling over case resolutions often doesn't begin until a week or two after grand jury indictment, which typically doesn't happen for some seven weeks after arrest.

Duplicating Hamilton County's methods here would be difficult, officials say, because Hamilton County has unified court and jail systems. Cuyahoga County is much more balkanized, with 13 municipal courts and dozens of police agencies, each of which moves at its own pace. "That's a big problem," said Robert Glickman, a former Common Pleas judge and prosecutor.

On any given day in Cuyahoga County, anywhere from 175 to 300 jail inmates accounting for as much as 17 percent of the jail's capacity are waiting just to get indicted, said Dan Peterca, manager of pretrial services for the county probation department.

More than half of those are nonviolent offenders who can't afford to hire lawyers, can't afford to pay bail and who ultimately will be eligible for probation, Peterca said.

"Unfortunately, for a number of people, they spend more time in pretrial detention than they do after they get sentenced," Peterca said.

Take Timothy Swan, for instance, a homeless man arrested in April 2003 for breaking into a boarded-up business on Detroit Avenue in Cleveland. Swan spent 63 days in jail before he was indicted, four more before his court-appointed attorney was assigned and yet 16 more before his guilty plea to breaking and entering was accepted.

Thirty-four days after that, Swan was sentenced to probation. He had already spent nearly four months behind bars.

Luna said such stories describe a "two-tiered" system of justice in Cuyahoga County: one for those who can afford to hire lawyers and make bail, and another for those who must sit in jail because they can't.

"It's very troubling," Luna said. "It may be consistent with the letter of the Sixth Amendment " the constitutional guarantee of legal counsel for all criminal defendants. "But I don't think it's consistent with the spirit. It seems to me that those individuals who can't pay for their own counsel in that interim are at a vast disadvantage."

Mason says he has speeded up the indictment process since taking office in 1999. But Cuyahoga won't be able to approach Hamilton County's pace, he said, until the court, prosecutors and police coordinate their efforts and link their computer networks.

That could allow police to file arrest reports within 24 hours, freeing prosecutors to move more quickly to the grand jury, Mason said. As it stands now, he said, Cleveland police typically take about 20 days to deliver reports to prosecutors for suspects who are in jail. For those not in jail, the wait is more than 80 days. "We can only move a file after we have it," Mason said.

Even then, the files sometimes are incomplete. And prosecutors say that about 200 indictments are delayed every month because officers simply don't show up for grand juries.

Slow indictments can cost

prosecutors their cases

The Cleveland police are not solely responsible for these delays, however: The Plain Dealer analysis of court data over the past five years found virtually no difference in the speed of indictments for Cleveland cases versus those from the suburbs.

Whatever the cause, slow indictments can cost more than just time and money. In extreme cases, like Darnell Harold's, they can also cost prosecutors their case.

Under Ohio's speedy trial law, incarcerated defendants are entitled to a trial within 90 days of arrest unless they waive the right, or are also being held for another reason, like a probation or parole violation.

Cleveland police arrested Harold, 23, on Oct. 10, 2002, and charged him with possessing 33 rocks of crack cocaine enough to earn him up to eight years in prison if convicted.

But it wasn't until Dec. 30 80 days after Harold was booked into the County Jail that a grand jury indicted him on drug trafficking charges, leaving just 10 days to bring him to trial. Prosecutors blamed the delay on the arresting officer, who failed to respond to grand jury subpoenas four times, records show.

When Harold saw a Common Pleas judge for the first time on the charge, on Jan. 21, 2003, the judge lowered his bail from $25,000 to $5,000 so he could get out of jail. By that time, however, he had already been behind bars for 101 days well past the 90-day limit.

Prosecutors argued that they could take their time in Harold's case because he was on probation from a prior conviction. But Judge Michael Russo didn't buy it. He dismissed Harold's case altogether.

Records show that it's common for prosecutors to adopt this relaxed approach to speedy indictments when defendants are on probation or parole and the 90-day limit is thought not to apply.

And while the Harold outcome is fairly rare, the more leisurely pace in such cases can dramatically drive up the costs for taxpayers by needlessly extending the inmates' stay at the County Jail.

The case of Maurice McDuffie illustrates the point.

Cleveland police arrested him on April 13, 2002, after finding a crack rock in his sock. But McDuffie, 23, who was already on parole, was allowed to sit in the County Jail for more than five months before he was indicted in September.

McDuffie pleaded guilty to drug possession, and on Oct. 25 Judge Kathleen Sutula sentenced him to seven months in state prison. But by the time McDuffie got there, he had just a little more than a week left to serve.

In the end, McDuffie received credit for serving 201 days of his sentence in the County Jail, at $51 a day, for a final cost to Cuyahoga County taxpayers of $10,251.

He spent a mere nine days in state prison. McDuffie's prison bill, split among all Ohio taxpayers, was roughly $500.

But it's not only slow indictments that inflate local jail costs. Some of the county's 33 trial judges play a significant role as well.

Cuyahoga County taxpayers paid $20,757 to house Tracy Brassfield in the County Jail for the 407 days it took for his drug trafficking case to work its way through the courthouse. That came to more than half of the two-year sentence Brassfield eventually received for smuggling an estimated 44 pounds of marijuana from Florida under the fuel tank of his car.

True, it took prosecutors 51 days to indict Brassfield. But records show that the real delays were run up in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Pokorny, who allowed the defendant to switch lawyers three times, leading to no fewer than 14 pretrial conferences, seven aborted trial dates and more than 380 pretrial confinement days for Brassfield in the County Jail.

Taken as a whole, as far as speed is concerned, the Cuyahoga County bench doesn't stand out compared with other urban courts in Ohio. After indictments are issued, records show, Cuyahoga County is slightly slower than Hamilton County in resolving cases, slightly faster than Lucas County and considerably faster than Franklin County.

But overall statistics mask the fact that some Cuyahoga County judges are exceptionally slow. Pokorny, one of the five slowest judges on the bench, according to an analysis of court records since 2000, typically takes at least a month longer to resolve criminal cases than his quickest colleagues.

Pokorny said speed is less important than deliberation. "What I try to do is concentrate on the quality of my work," he said.

But Pokorny is a speed demon compared with Griffin, who not only is the slowest judge on the county bench by far, but largely as a result, has also run up the biggest taxpayer tab for inmate days in the County Jail.

More than half the cases assigned to Griffin's court since the first of 2000 have taken 110 days or longer to complete, according to a review of all closed cases over the past four years. By contrast, the court's speediest judge, Bridget McCafferty, dispatches more than half of her cases in 50 days or fewer.

And Griffin's overall jail tab since 2000 has topped $6 million, records show, compared with just $2.8 million for McCafferty.

The saga of David E. Williams helps explain why.

A 37-year-old crack user with a long history of drug-related court cases, Williams first arrived on Griffin's docket after a December 2001 arrest in Cleveland for possession of a crack pipe. He would be arrested two more times before the following July, when Griffin sentenced Williams to probation and drug treatment.

A few months later, Williams walked away from drug treatment and was arrested again. Two more arrests quickly followed; Williams pleaded guilty to several charges and, in May 2003, Griffin sentenced him again to probation and drug treatment.

Williams abandoned treatment once more and piled up still more arrests before Griffin sentenced Williams in February to eight months in prison.

During his 26 months on Griffin's docket, Williams accumulated nine separate indictments and was booked in and out of the County Jail six times, records show, spending a total of 390 days behind bars at a cost to the county of $19,890.

To Griffin, Williams symbolizes the court system's difficulties in dealing with low-level drug users which account for a significant portion of the court's docket.

The judge believes prison is "counterproductive" for offenders like Williams, so he offers them drug treatment and long stints on probation, where they are tested frequently for drugs. "I think the people who are sending the Williamses to the penitentiary are wasting public money," Griffin said.

"I place a large number of defendants on probation. I think they should have an incentive to behave . . . and to get themselves together."

Griffin makes no apologies for his philosophy, saying he believes it's the best way to achieve the purpose of the criminal justice system.

But he also acknowledges that his tendency to put nonviolent offenders on extended probation can clog up his docket and actually increase the local jail population.

Under court rules, new felony indictments are randomly assigned among the judges. But if a suspect is indicted while on probation in another case, hardly an uncommon occurrence, the suspect's new case is automatically assigned to the judge who originally ordered probation.

As a result, judges more likely to use probation expand their own caseloads. And if, like Griffin, they operate slowly to begin with, the increased load only magnifies the problem.

In the sheriff's weekly inmate head counts, Griffin consistently leads the entire bench by a wide margin in defendants behind bars.

Sheriff's reminders

don't speed things up

Griffin dismissed the sheriff's standard as arbitrary and claimed it does not account for the intricacies of each individual case.

Apparently sharing this philosophy is Judge Ann T. Mannen who, except for several months early last year, has also consistently exceeded the sheriff's recommended inmate count. Although Mannen denies it, sheriff's officials say she told them to quit sending her the weekly reminders in mid-2003.

One of the five slowest judges on the bench, according to records, Mannen has acquired a reputation among prosecutors and defense attorneys alike for being generous in granting de lays to lawyers in her courtroom.

For instance, records show that Mannen postponed the felonious-assault trial of Tamicka Johnson no fewer than a dozen times, allowing the case to drag on for 26 months after it was first assigned to her docket in June 2000.

In the meantime, Johnson gave birth and raised her child to 14 months of age before being brought to trial. In September 2002, Mannen sentenced Johnson to five years of probation.

Just last October, a prosecutor pleaded with Mannen to accelerate a much-delayed domestic violence case that had dragged the alleged victim and police-officer witnesses to court for nothing on seven occasions.

With Mannen poised to delay the felony trial an eighth time in October, Assistant County Prosecutor Mylayna Albright argued that yet another delay "would impose an increased burden on the victim and witnesses." Mannen postponed the case anyway.

A month later 18 months after his arrest 32-year-old Mi chael Hamdan pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Mannen put him on probation for six months.

Mannen says she's more concerned with "doing the right thing" than moving cases along. So she will grant delays if the lawyers say they need more time to resolve the case fairly.

She also points out that prosecutors add to delays in her court by declining to plea bargain with some defendants, particularly those with drug problems, because they're afraid she'll grant them probation.

"There's a trade-off," Mannen said. "Efficiency doesn't always translate into justice. I'm going to choose fairness over anything."

Postponements and delays happen in every courtroom the product of a system where most lawyers are scheduled to be several places at once. Defense lawyers say delays can strategically benefit clients who are guilty. The more often a case is postponed, the more likely a witness won't appear in court, hampering the prosecution.

But for the wrongly accused, like Michael Quinn of Euclid, justice delayed can be like water torture.

Quinn, 22, was arrested in Cleveland on Aug. 28, 2002, for allegedly stealing a car and was released on bail several hours later.

It took Cuyahoga County prosecutors over two months to get him indicted on one count of receiving stolen property.

It took the court 74 more days until Jan. 21, 2003 to get Quinn into a courtroom and assign his case to Judge Pokorny. And that's when things really slowed down.

Over the next year, Pokorny postponed Quinn's trial no fewer than 13 times. The victim of the car theft appeared in court 11 times expecting to testify, but never did. Finally, she stopped coming.

Quinn showed up every time, insisting all along that he was innocent. And Pokorny now acknowledges that, had he been more aggressive in forcing a trial date, Quinn's ordeal could have been shortened considerably.

As it happened, it wasn't until February, more than a year after Quinn's case landed in Pokorny's courtroom, that prosecutors discovered a fatal flaw in their case.

Police had originally said they arrested Quinn immediately after the auto theft, which bolstered a witness' account. But records indicate that Quinn wasn't actually picked up until 14 hours later, raising doubts about the accuracy of that account. And prosecutors could no longer lo cate the arresting officer, one of 250 Cleveland officers laid off two months earlier, to try to explain the discrepancy.

Seventeen months after Quinn was arrested, with no witnesses left and a major factual hole in the evidence, prosecutors threw in the towel.

The defendant, one wrote in Quinn's case file, "probably didn't do it."

The Plain Dealer

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2004


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