SUPERIOR COURT GETS EXTENSION FOR SOME ARRAIGNMENTS, TRIALS
Officials say goal is to arraign defendants in 48 hours by summer
The San Diego Superior Court will continue to use emergency authorization from the state court leader to extend legal deadlines for holding some arraignments and trials, as it continues to try to bring court operations back to pre-pandemic levels.
But meeting that goal is likely some months away, according to the court’s own estimation.
In an application to extend the time for holding an arraignment for people in custody — the first court appearance for someone charged with a crime where a plea is entered and bail set — Presiding Judge Lorna Alksne wrote that officials are working on a plan to hold all such hearings within the legal timeline of 48 hours after an arrest.
But the plan is still in development and lots of logistics have to be worked out, she wrote. “The goal however is that by mid to late summer the court will be able to process all felony arraignments within 48 hours,” she wrote in an application for an extension to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.
Under the new order signed April 6 the court can take up to seven days after an arrest to arraign someone. The order is good through May 5.
While court officials say that they are arraigning most defendants sooner than seven days after arrest, the capacity in the jails to conduct video hearings limits the number of cases that can be heard on a given day.
There are 18 rooms inside the jails equipped with the videoconferencing technology, and while the court has 58 courtrooms across the county set up to conduct remote video hearings, only 16 are being used to handle hearings for people in the county jail system.
Those hearings are not just for arraignments but a variety of other matters such as readiness conferences, sentencings and bail reviews, Alksne wrote.
One way to speed up arraignments would be to do them live and not remote, with defendants bused to courts from the jails and defense lawyers in courtrooms representing them. Some judges privately complain that the Office of the Public Defender is reluctant to send lawyers in while the coronavirus pandemic goes on, wary of interacting with potentially unvaccinated inmates and members of the public.
Randy Mize, head of the office that represents the vast majority of defendants in the court system, said that while some lawyers are concerned about heading back
into the courtroom for live hearings (all work remotely now) that number is far less than it was two months ago. That’s largely because workers in the court system, including prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and court staff, were quietly bumped up in the vaccine priority rollout by the county and got vaccinated.
Now, while supporting an extension of the arraignments for a while longer, Mize said the courts need to move toward opening fully.
“On the whole we are ready to go back into the courtrooms,” he said. “I want to do it in a reasonable, rational, safe way.”
And so long as there is not another surge of COVID-19 cases and infections continue to trend lower, Mize said, “we will be ready to go back in June for everything.”
The San Diego County Sheriff ’s Department, which runs the jails, also favored an arraignment extension, records show. The department said in a letter submitted to the chief justice that the seven-day window allows it to quarantine new inmates and manage the overall jail population to prevent disease outbreaks. The Sheriff ’s Department is also reluctant to transfer busloads of inmates daily to wait in holding cells in courthouses for arraignments.
The extension will also
allow the department to offer more inmates the vaccine. The department’s own records show that 30 percent of inmates that were offered the vaccine have refused it — a statistic that puts into perspective the reluctance of some defense lawyers to meet face to face with clients in initial courtroom appearances.
In addition to the extension on arraignments the court got another extension on the time limit for bringing cases to trial. Many courts in the state also asked for and received the same extension for jury trials, as courts struggle with some hesitancy by jurors to show up for service, restrictions on how many people can be indoors in a courtroom or jury assembly room, and a large backlog.
There have been 19 criminal jury trials and four civil jury trials held in the nine weeks since jury trials resumed Feb. 8, according to the court’s public information officer Emily Cox.
Currently, there are 721 felony cases and another 5,776 misdemeanor cases set for trial, according to the San Diego County District Attorney’s office. While it is true that the vast majority of cases ended up in a plea bargains, especially misdemeanors, that can be a daunting backlog.
In 2019, the last full year of court operations without the pandemic, the court empaneled a total of 435 juries for felony criminal trials.