Docket's 'birthing pains' causing jail population boom in St. Louis

St. Louis Daily Record & St. Louis Countian, Apr 3, 2007 by Allison Retka

Several St. Louis Circuit Court judges are alarmed by how few criminal cases have been processed by the courts since the beginning of the year, a situation blamed in part on the city's new individual docketing system.

At this time last year, 1,200 criminal cases had been heard and disposed by the court. This year, just 807 cases have gone through the system since Jan. 1.

The lag in dispositions has caused a tremendous bump in the number of defendants housed in the city's two jail facilities as more people wait in jail for a trial or sentencing hearing.

The St. Louis Division of Corrections was forced to open two vacant units in the City Justice Center last month to house 79 more inmates, said Lorenzo Chancelor, the division's population specialist.

"With the increase, we just had no choice," he said. As of Monday, there are nearly 400 inmates in the Justice Center and the Medium Security Institution on Hall Street that were not there a year ago.

At the Monday morning meeting of the court en banc, Circuit Judge Michael B. Calvin called the situation an emergency matter.

"We need to do something immediately," Calvin said. "I think we're looking at trouble if we're going to have to defend ourselves on this."

Judge Evelyn M. Baker said the sluggish disposition rate was caused by scheduling problems between the court and city prosecutors.

The circuit attorney has divided its workload into "A" and "B" weeks for 12 years, said Shirley Rogers, chief trial assistant to Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce. Half the office's prosecutors, about 25 attorneys, are on the "A" team and are available for trial on "A" weeks.

Baker said the "A/B" system doesn't work with the new individual dockets, but Rogers disagreed and said the scheduling system has not caused any problems.

"I don't see how "A/B" comes into play at all, not when you have that many people available," she said. "I think it's just an adjustment period."

Rogers chalked up the delays to the docketing changeover and also credited the city police's new Crime Suppression Unit, rolled out in January, with more arrests and for taking more people into custody.

A former city prosecutor herself, Baker criticized the circuit attorney's office for not using nights and weekends to push their criminal cases through the system.

"They need to run it like a law firm," she said. "It's not a nine- to-five business."

Judge Michael P. David compared the current criminal disposition process to pulling teeth. He said these days, in a good week he will get 13 defendants before him for a trial, a sentencing or a probation hearing.

"I used to do that [many] in a day," David said.

"It's horrible, the difference in the number of cases," Baker said. She said at this point last year she had presided over nine jury trials for criminal cases. This year, her courtroom had seen only four.

Presiding Judge Thomas C. Grady reminded the judges that the court is still experiencing some "birth pains" from the controversial shift to individual dockets on Jan. 1.

"How long is the pregnancy?" quipped Judge Lisa VanAmburg.

Calvin insisted the changeover to individual dockets does not account for the gap in criminal dispositions. He urged the court to dispose of at least 25 criminal cases a month.

Judge David L. Dowd, chairman of the court's review and evaluation committee, wants to maximize the amount of cases on the court's criminal dockets to make a dent in the city's prison population. Grady assigned the matter to Dowd, telling him to report back at next month's en banc meeting or at a special meeting that could be called in the next two weeks.

Upping the cases on the criminal dockets would help, said Chancelor, because once they get their day in court, many inmates would be transferred to state-run prison facilities or released back into society.

"Over the years working in corrections, you see right around the holidays, in November and December, the numbers go up, but after the holidays they go down," Chancelor said. "Here, it just failed. It never went down."