Courts Monitor launching national edition

September 13, 2013 By

The California Courts Monitor, “your daily ration of civil justice rationing,” is launching a national edition. The National Courts Monitor will bring the same focus to the crisis in United State’s civil courts as it has to California courts, according to Publisher Sara Warner.  

The announcement was made in San Francisco Friday and timed to accompany a national asbestos litigation conference. The CCM also released an “update” of its Special Report on the California civil courts funding crisis, a newspaper-styled print edition that was distributed in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The publisher also announced that the website will begin producing similar print editions that focus on specific events, including state budget hearings and legal conferences.
 
“We’ve evolved into an online community resource for the civil courts community and our goal is to build on that,” said Warner. “And part of that is the combination of online and print.”
 
The national edition, she added, will also produce print editions focused on specific civil justice events or issues, especially when they involve funding the justice system.

She said the NCM will begin publishing online in the first quarter of 2014, quipping “is that vague enough for you?” The California website began publishing with a more general courts focus in 2012, but shifted to civil courts funding issues as a spate of budget cuts slashed through the judicial system. In addition to daily aggregation updates and occasional original reporting, the CCM has produced two newsprint products fashioned as “special reports” on courts issues.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Trial Courts Held ‘Hostage’ In Security Cost Dispute

August 23, 2013 By
Now even the most basic courthouse security is a budget issue. In effect, California’s sheriffs and its judges are having a debate over paying for deputies who protect the courts. The Courthouse News Service explains that “… at the heart of the dispute is the question of who should ask the Legislature for the money to pay local sheriff departments for courthouse security.
 
The issue brought heated comments during a meeting earlier this month where judges settled on proposed distributions within the trial court slice of the roughly $3.4 billion California court budget… the trial courts are in agreement that funding for security should be on the list of priorities submitted to Gov. Jerry Brown’s finance department, said committee chair Judge Laurie Earl of Sacramento. But there is a dispute over who should make the request.
 
Part of the argument is that law enforcement budget requests are better received by the legislature and governor than court funding requests. It’s a story that tells us a lot about the status of civil courts in the state, and you can read it here.
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , ,

NPR Posting Story On Rural Courthouse Closing

August 12, 2013 By
National Public Radio is reporting nationally on the closing of a rural Fresno County court, including quoting the presiding judge making the case that budgets left no choice. NPR’s Emily Green reports that “… Gary Hoff, presiding judge of Fresno County Superior Court, says he knew closing the courts would mean some people just wouldn’t go to the courts looking for justice, but that the closures were necessary.
 
“We knew that closing the courts would deny people in outlying jurisdictions the availability of going to a local courthouse to take care of their business,” he says. “I know others have disagreed with our choice, but financially we could not do anything else but close those courts. We have to live within our budget.”
 
See how NPR documents the dismantling of our justice system here.

 

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Courts Begin New System For Rationing Budget

August 7, 2013 By
It was just a “drop in the bucket,” according to California’s chief courts fiscal officer, but the restored funding from our recently passed state budget is being allocated under a new formula that creates winners and losers. The San Francisco Appeal website has a good accounting of its local situation, noting that the “increase” actually “… still leaves the superior courts $201 million short of the amount received last year, on top of previous cuts of $214 million.”
 
The website explains “… the new allocation formula, developed by an advisory committee of judges and court executives, takes account of varying court workloads that may have changed in recent years because of population growth or other factors. The previous formula, used for the past 15 years, was based primarily on the share each superior court had in 1998, the year the state government took over court funding from the individual counties. That approach didn’t keep up with increased court workloads in counties where the population grew faster.”
 
The $60 million added to the state budget at the last minute is considered “new” spending and will come under the new guidelines.
 
In the Bay Area, it’s been widely reported that Contra Costa, Monterey, Solano and Sonoma county superior courts will get more funding under the new system than they would have under the old formula. Los Angeles Superior Court is also expected to get a slight increase over what it would have gotten before.
 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Prisons Offer Lessons For Courts Rationing

August 5, 2013 By
There are lessons for civil justice advocates in the ongoing soap opera over California’s prison overcrowding. One is that the state can and will shift its responsibilities to counties, in this case moving inmates to county jails. Another is that the “miracle” of Gov. Brown’s “balanced budget” hinges on many such moves to effectively de-fund agencies. And yet another is that it may take years and years, but the chickens do come home to roost.
 
The news is that a U.S. Supreme Court decision pretty much gives the state a late December deadline for meeting the terms of a 2009 ruling by a  special three-judge panel. That panel said that the state’s 33 prisons were too overcrowded to provide prisoners adequate medical and mental health care. The governor has already met much of the court’s demand from what he calls a “realignment program,” which simply shifted low-level offenders from state prisons to county jails.
 
It’s unclear what, exactly, the state will do. But it’s worth noting that they have already shifted many “low-level” non-violent inmates to the counties. That means those left in prisons are those that did not make the cut for county jails. And yet another lesson for the civil courts, where cutbacks have also impacted the ability of the disabled to attain public services, that the state sometimes responds only when ordered to respond.
 
As usual, Howard Mintz (@hmintz)at the Mercury News newspaper makes a complex situation easy to understand. Read his article here. 
 
 
Follow CCM on Twitter @CACourtsMonitor
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Juvenile Court Judge Feeling Crappy About Justice System

June 25, 2013 By
 
Jim Newton’s L.A. Times column Monday offered a glimpse into what’s already happening to the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, which continues to be a victim of the state’s judicial rationing. Newton profiled Judge Michael Nash, who supervises the court and is heralded by some for increasing transparency in the “Dependency Court” where foster care cases are heard. 
Michael Nash, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court in Los Angeles County (The Los Angeles Times published this photo as part of the juvenile court story.)

Michael Nash, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court in Los Angeles County. (The Los Angeles Times published this photo as part of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court story.)

 
“I feel as crappy about things as I have in a long time,” Nash tells the paper, adding that “… it’s just very difficult to do the job in a meaningful way.” Budget cuts are, of course, part of that and he also laments what he feels are poor social worker decisions about taking kids out of homes – a process he thinks is partly because the workers worry about being “second guessed.” 
 
The column includes some eye-popping stats: “As of today, [Nash] said, each of the court’s 20 full-time judges handles roughly 1,350 cases at any given time, well above the recommended maximum. Often, matters of grave consequence must be heard and decided in minutes, even when they call for careful deliberation. A typical day’s calendar for a Dependency Court judge might include deciding how much and what type of medication to authorize for a child; whether to remove children from homes after allegations of neglect or abuse; and whether to place them in the hands of strangers or relatives, or return them to shaky parents.”
 
What will be more difficult to track is what happens to the court now that access to justice has been curtailed to the point that we’re bound to have more homeless, more bench warrants and more trouble hitting homes. You can read the column here and you can follow the writer on Twitter: @newton jim. 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Iranian TV News Still Covering Court Cuts

June 20, 2013 By
Click here to watch the Press TV report about California courts budget cuts.

Click here to watch the Press TV report about California courts budget cuts.

While most of the state’s TV journalists have adopted the “California budget miracle deal” narrative, at least one international news service has created a fairly detailed report with focus on how continuing cutbacks impact poor and handicapped citizens. The Tehran-based Press TV uses extensive (by TV news standards) video of a street protest at downtown’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse and David Sapp, an ACLU spokesperson, comments on-air.
 
 
Sapp notes that it’s actually illegal not to provide access to justice for the handicapped. The Press TV report is also among the few to predict increases in bench warrants and vehicle seizures because people will not be able to access the court system.
 

You can see the report (it’s in English) here.  

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Strange Days Loom As Budget Deadlines Near, Courts Still Face Crisis

May 8, 2013 By
It remains quiet – too quiet! – on the media front as the California courts budget crisis gets eclipsed by high-profile moves to move or release prison inmates and other high-profile issues. As we’ve noted before, one challenge facing civil courts is that nobody knows what they’ve got until its gone, and for many the access to family law and other justice services is going, going…

The public part of the state budget debates is held during the “June gloom” season because the state constitution “requires” the legislature to pass the budget by June 15, a deadline that has been seldom met (we went 23 of 24 years missing it, but passed it on time last year), and never with any real consequence. As a budget expert with Gov. Schwarzenegger famously put it:  “If you do something bad and you never get punished for it, then you don’t see it as being bad anymore.”
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , ,

Shifting Costs, Releasing Prisoners Helps Balance a Budget

May 7, 2013 By
 
Here are a couple of ways the state of California is reaching that “balanced budget” we hear so much about: cutting courts and shifting prison populations to local jails. The HealthyCal.org website has a well-sourced story out of San Mateo that illustrates how the problems go hand in hand, although typically we’re seeing the civil courts take more cuts than the criminal courts – likely because plenty of constitutional guarantees dominate criminal cases.
 
San Mateo is a microcosm of what is happening throughout the state, San Mateo Presiding Judge Robert Foiles told the website. They also noted a scary fact from that recent survey of trial courts for the state Judicial Council, which administers the courts: 11 of the 48 counties that responded reported they weren’t able to process domestic violence temporary restraining orders on the same day they’re filed.
 
Here’s the background for San Mateo: Over the past five years, trial courts throughout the state have had their budgets slashed by about $1 billion because of the state’s fiscal crisis. Before the cuts San Mateo County had $12 million in reserve. They are now down to $1.2 million. The governor’s proposed budget for this year would mean another $4.5 million budget shortfall. The court has cut more than 30 percent of its workforce. If the Governor’s proposed budget passes, they will have to shutter the central courthouse and reduce the South San Francisco courthouse to two judges – who will only hear the most serious cases.
 
We perhaps treat civil and criminal courts as different worlds, and this report shows the interaction. Read it here.  
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bay Area Federal Courthouses Closing On Some Fridays

May 2, 2013 By
 
Those justice system budget hits just keep on coming, and in addition to state cuts we’re seeing federal impacts from Washington’s budget “sequester.” The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that “… for the first time in decades, the Bay Area’s federal courthouses in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose will shut their doors for a day each month to save money.” The report says that San Francisco and San Jose federal courts will close the first Friday of each month until September, while the Oakland branch will do the same on the first Monday of the month… the Northern California federal court system also will lock its Eureka satellite branch on the same Fridays.
 
The paper noted that “Bay Area courts are not alone in their budget misery. Colorado’s federal courts are taking the same step. The Los Angeles federal courts are closing clerks’ offices for seven Fridays through August, while the Utah courts cut the number of criminal matters heard each day.”
 
Read the story here. 
Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: , , , , ,
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