Lessons to learn from court

It’s been suggested on occasion that a worthwhile class trip for young school kids, as opposed to, say, Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, or to Rye Playland in New York, would be a day in the arraignment courtroom of one of Connecticut’s Superior court

The lessons would be many. The parade of manacled defendants shuffling toward the judge is itself a sobering, memorable image.

But there is also the sense of tedium, of time evaporating, particularly in the lives of the accused, some of whom will certainly be found not guilty, but also in the lives of the court personnel — judges, prosecutors, lawyers, clerks, marshals, state police and so on — mired in the bog of the system.

All these facets are sharply evident in a big city facility like Bridgeport’s Golden Hill Street courthouse.

And while Bridgeport may be the poster child for a clogged justice pipeline — more than 300 cases, for instance, were on the docket at Golden Hill Street last Wednesday — problems are evident in varying degrees in all of the state’s 15 Superior courthouses.

Exacerbating the situation is the protocol Connecticut follows in processing defendants through Superior Court. It’s an unwieldy one that, according to recent reports, can result in a single case appearing on a docket 20 times, as it bounces through the system awaiting a decision on whether it’s worth prosecuting.

Most states, according to Chief State’s Attorney Kevin Kane, follow a process in which cases go directly to a district attorney who decides whether the case has merit.

In Connecticut, though, cases are referred directly to Superior Court, where they can become snared in a maze of continuances and confound the efforts of burdened court personnel as officials weigh the cases.

Now, with a $200,000 foundation grant, the state’s Division of Criminal Justice is going to change things up in hopes of speeding up justice and, as a result, saving money.

Though Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has called for criminal justice reform, money has been short.

The grant will fund a yearlong pilot program for Bridgeport and Waterbury. The money will let the state hire a prosecutor and social worker to screen low-level, nonviolent cases before they go into court.

Work is already under way in Bridgeport with a prosecutor, soon to be joined by a social worker, reviewing cases, many of which involve mental illness or drug abuse. As an example of how this work could streamline the process, Kane said, many of the people in these cases could be sent directly to the same program they would likely end up in after their cases had ricocheted around the court system for months.

Prosecutors understandably have been skeptical about the program. They are, after all, prosecutors.

But the more the court system can winnow the field and divert those people who have a problem and are willing to address it, the more time, resources and energy will there be to prosecute the truly bad characters who endanger us.

Exacerbating the situation is the protocol Connecticut follows in processing defendants through Superior Court. It’s an unwieldy one that, according to recent reports, can result in a single case appearing on a docket 20 times, as it bounces through the system awaiting a decision on whether it’s worth prosecuting.