Law School Offers ‘Practice’ Courtroom For Holding Court

May 10, 2013 By
Here’s how bad it’s getting for California courts amid the closures and cutbacks: the Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa is offering to lend its new 4,400-square-foot “practice courtroom” to the actual courts, even offering to hold trials there. The courtroom opened last month amid much fanfare, and California Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye spoke at opening ceremonies.
 
It’s also an example of walking the talk, because much of the funding for the $2-million facility, according to the Los Angeles Times, came from Whittier graduate Paul Kiesel, who is also co-chairman of the Open Courts Coalition, the bipartisan lawyers group lobbying to reverse California’s years of court budget cuts.
 
“In the last five years,” Kiesel told the Times, “the courts’ budget has been cut by $1 billion.” He said the cuts have resulted in a backlog of 20,000 personal-injury cases in Los Angeles County alone. You can read the LA Times story here.
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State Budget Ideas List Courts Among Lawmaker Concerns

May 9, 2013 By

Exactly on cue, opposition views are starting to emerge in advance of Gov. Brown’s next draft of a state budget, which is expected next week. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that state Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, a Democrat and former union political director from L.A., lists increased courts funding among his concerns. The news brought quick comment from Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, who has called upon lawmakers to invest in the justice system.

“I applaud the speaker’s leadership in articulating the need to begin reinvesting in the courts,” she said in a statement to the Times. “His knowledge and understanding of the equal access to justice issues are a great benefit to all Californians.”

The speaker’s comments are hardly casual. The “ideas” were developed along with his fellow members of the Assembly Democratic Caucus and came during a speech to the Sacramento Press Club. That means it’s another step toward the state budget debate that begins for real when Brown releases the next version of his spending plan.

Read about other issues in the complete LA Times story here.

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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.”
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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.  
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Profile of Court Fees Increases Amid Budget Crisis

May 6, 2013 By
 
Just in time for the increasing discussion of special court fees, like the ones for accessing public documents that is effectively shelved for the time being, a Sacramento Bee story outlines that any “temporary” fees tend to become permanent, and cites a court fee as the oldest example.
 
Jim Sanders, who wrote the Bee report, says that 13 of of 21 “temporary” fees received extensions, cumulatively raising more than $70 million annually for programs ranging from a missing persons database to an effort to fight auto insurance fraud.” He then notes that “… perhaps the oddest Capitol trail left by a single fee involved five bills over the past decade to raise millions for California courts. What is now a $40 court fee tacked onto all criminal convictions, including traffic violations, began as a $20 charge in 2003. It later was raised to $30, then to $40, then expiration dates were eliminated, leaving the charge permanent.”

Allowed uses also shift. That court fee, for example, was initially earmarked for security but can now be used for administration. It will be an important issue in the upcoming crunch-time debates over what funding the legislature actually finds to address the growing courts crisis.

 
Read the full story here.
 
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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. 
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Doing The Math, Losers Take Note Of New Court Funding Scheme

May 1, 2013 By
An Associated Press story getting wide statewide play breaks down the newly proposed courts funding as “… a new formula for distributing more than $1 billion in state funding for California’s 58 trial courts that would take money from some court systems and give it to rural and fast-growing counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino.”
 
While that may be over simplification, it does illustrate that the state is about to pick winners and losers in courts funding, which could have some jurisdictions focusing on the new allotments instead of the big-picture courts funding. For example, San Bernardino has been the poster county for rationing justice, and it is among the “winners” in the new formula. Losers? Well, the AP says that “… Santa Clara County would be the biggest loser in the San Francisco Bay Area, absorbing more than $10 million in cuts in the next five years, the San Jose Mercury News reported.”
 
You can read the AP report, via The Fresno Bee, here.
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Winners, Losers Likely As State Revises Court Funding

April 29, 2013 By
For the first time in nearly 20 years, the group that administers California’s courts is changing how cash is divided among 58 state trial courts, and there are winners and losers among individual counties. The Courthouse News is among those reporting on the changes, explaining in a detailed story that “.. the old funding model was frozen along historic lines, based on ratios established in 1994 that carried forward into 1997 legislation that centralized court funding and rule-making and started a big expansion of the central administrative office. After Friday’s vote, trial court funding will slowly begin taking into account the volume of cases handled by individual trial courts along with other factors.”
 
Among those likely to be losing significant funding: Orange County. Among those likely to be gaining funds, given the case-filing pattern of late, Los Angeles County. But many details must be considered and the Judicial Council more or less admits this is only being done because state lawmakers insisted on changes before even considering increased court funding.
 
Check out the excellent story here.
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Report: Even Litigation Settlement Department Getting Cut

April 24, 2013 By
 
If one result of the ongoing Superior Courts cutbacks will be forcing more out-of-court settlements, that will apparently have to occur without much help from the department that helps folks settle, according to a public radio station report. The KPCC newsroom reports that “… the Alternate Dispute Resolution department stopped accepting referrals [this month]. Those cases involve arbitration, mediation and other matters in which litigants in civil, family or probate disputes opt to settle outside of a courtroom.”
 
Reporter Erika Aguilar also notes that the ADR department began closing offices at courthouses this month and will continue with closures next month [May]—aiming to wrap up all ADR cases by May 10. On the job front, with more than 500 jobs expected to be cut, Aguilar cites court spokesperson Mary Hearn saying in an email last month that she wasn’t sure how many employees would be laid off. “Layoffs will be done according to seniority,” Hearn wrote. “There is no direct correlation between the locations shutting down and the staff employed in those locations being laid off.” 
 
The excellent KPCC report also has info on which courthouses will be closing. Read it here. 

 
 
 
 
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Court funding: Politics large and small

April 22, 2013 By

Article from CCM’s Special Report – CIVIL COURTS: RATIONING JUSTICE IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY

A few weeks after a big downtown rally against Los Angeles Superior Court reorganization, a middle-aged man who had attended the protest walked into a Starbucks next to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse and ordered an elaborate latte concoction.

“It would be different,” he mused as they prepared the drink, “if the judges were elected.” 

He must have been thinking of federal court, because the Superior Court judges held up as out-of-touch 1 percenters at the protest ARE elected, albeit in the most unheralded races anyone might imagine. That near-total lack of political interest is a key reason that this “special report” is a long-form accounting of what amounts to simple political Darwinism.

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