Courts partially shut down; jails limit intake.
Federal courts for the Eastern District of Wisconsin late Friday announced they are virtually shutting down until May, postponing all jury trials, sentencings, revocation hearings and naturalization ceremonies.
Chief U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper signed the order, citing the quickly changing assessment of the seriousness of public health threats posed by the COVID-19 virus.
The downtown Milwaukee courthouse will remain open, she said, but tasks from search warrant reviews to initial appearances will be done electronically. Judges will continue ruling on written pleadings.
The order followed similar changes announced earlier for state courts in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties, and changes to limit the population at the Milwaukee County Jail.
Jury trials in Milwaukee County Circuit Court have been canceled for the next three weeks, and other operations will pare down and rely on phone appearances and the jail will book only those charged with the most serious crimes.
Waukesha County announced it was suspending all jury trials until May 12.
The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office took significant steps to reduce the chances of introducing the virus inside the facility.
In Milwaukee, lawyers can only meet with incarcerated clients via phone booths on each floor, or in windowed visitation rooms unless a face-to-face contact is authorized by a shift commander for particular reasons. They can also use the same phone-based private system most families use to visit with inmates.
Also as of Thursday, the sheriff’s office notified other county law enforcement agencies not to bring many of the people they arrest to the jail for booking. Only those charged with felonies and certain misdemeanors — domestic violence or repeat drunken driving — will be booked for the time being. All others charged with misdemeanors will be ordered to appear at Out of Custody Intake Court.
All aspects of courthouse operations were under review this week, with an eye on how to reduce the jail population and limit public interaction at the courthouse.
Normally, about 2,000 people a day enter the courthouse complex, consisting of the Courthouse, Safety Building and Criminal Justice Facility, joining about 800 employees. The emergency procedures would reduce those numbers dramatically.
Dropping jury trials would remove several hundred people a week from coming in for jury service. Most civil, family and probate matters will also be postponed, or handled by phone and video conference, depending on the discretion of the circuit’s 47 judges.
Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas on Friday restricted all non-essential access to the jail.
Lucas also said his office has “aggressively enforced internal social distancing measures, including suspending face-to-face meetings and large gatherings” and implemented “a detailed three-phase strategy for infectious disease prevention, containment and mitigation.”
Lucas’ chief of staff, Ted Chisholm, said the office is no longer holding meetings of more than 10 people, and nonessential operational staff will no longer go into the jail.
Chisholm said the jail’s contracted health care provider, Wellpath, has been screening new inmates for the COVID-19 virus already. So far, he said, there have been no cases or even suspected cases detected in the jail.
Wellpath also serves the Waukesha County Jail and has added similar precautions there, said Lt. Nicholas Ollinger.
If any cases of COVID-19 do emerge in the Milwaukee jail, Chisholm said, the jail has in place a plan to quickly identify and segregate affected inmates.
The state Department of Corrections on Friday also announced a temporary end to all non-professional visits at all the state’s prisons and other facilities.