Visiting judges help wheels of justice spin

3 from Mich. to help ease backlog of cases in Memphis

With federal caseloads growing, a vacant seat on the bench and no relief in sight, local court officials are calling in the cavalry from the north.

Under a special Visiting Judges Program, three federal judges from Michigan — one of the four states in the Sixth Judicial Circuit that includes Tennessee — have agreed to help ease the local backlog.

So far 30 local criminal and civil cases have been reassigned to the three judges — Robert Cleland, Stephen Murphy and Arthur Tarnow — who may be able to handle some of the work by teleconference, but who otherwise will be scheduling court time in Memphis.

The goal is to get Memphis out from under the official federal designation of being “a congested court,” where the judges dispose of many more cases per year than the national average, but where it also takes much longer to dispose of those cases. No one’s expecting a quick turnaround. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get our cases in and out the door more quickly without sacrificing quality,” said Thomas Gould,

clerk of the U.S. District Court for Western Tennessee. “We have a court that ranks near the top in terms of literally cranking out cases, but at the bottom in terms of time to dispose of them. We know why. It’s our case mix.”

The elevation last fall of U.S. Dist. Court Judge Bernice Donald to the federal appeals court bench has created a vacancy and thus added to the existing backlog. (Criminal Court Judge John Fowlkes Jr. has been nominated to fill the vacancy, though confirmation can be a lengthy process.)

That leaves three judges — Jon Mccalla, Samuel Mays Jr. and S. Thomas Anderson — to handle what Gould says is a mix of slowmoving criminal and civil cases that are unique to this region.

“It’s easily explained,” says Gould. “It’s not very easily cured.”

With 10 penal institutions in the jurisdiction, the federal court receives a large number cases filed by prison inmates representing themselves.

In 2010, the pro se inmate cases totaled 317 and made up 24 percent of all civil cases filed locally. Another 377, or 28 percent of mostly selfrepresented cases, came from hourly workers with civil rights and employment discrimination complaints.

Gould calls these the slowest-moving civil matters in federal court.

“Compared to a case that is represented by an attorney,” he said, “they’re going to take a long, long time to deal with.”

Criminal cases here also tend to drag, especially the many drug cases generated by officers stopping suspected drug couriers passing through the area on Interstate 55 and Interstate 40.

Memphis has one of the highest interdiction rates in the country and the drug cases often involve multiple - defendant conspiracy charges that are not easily settled.

Drug cases and illegal firearms cases made up 60 percent of the 518 criminal cases filed in federal court here in 2010.

Chief Deputy Clerk Wendy Oliver noted that, by comparison, border states such as New Mexico, Arizona and California regularly post huge numbers in the cases- disposed column because a large percentage are immigration violation cases that involve minimal paperwork and can be handled quickly.

“They had thousands of immigration cases,” she said. “It took 2.4 months in New Mexico to dispose of a case versus our 15 months.”

If the addition of visiting judges helps whittle down the caseloads for local judges, it also could mean more work and more pressure for lawyers.

“We’ll have to see how they handle their dockets and how fast they push their cases to disposition,” says criminal defense attorney Charles Mitchell, echoing Gould’s observation that drug cases take time to resolve. “It puts more pressure on prosecutors and defense attorneys to settle their cases, but these drug cases are not easy cases. They may involve complex conspiracies, multiple defendants and thousands of pages of documents.”

Gould does not believe the visiting judges will be the answer to the local court’s backlog, but said reinforcements should bring at least some temporary relief until Donald’s vacancy is filled.

Gould said other districts have similar caseload problems. “Many courts have never (used visiting judges) and others permanently have visiting judges on staff. Even with a full complement of judges, we’re going to be struggling to come out of the cellar in terms of how long it takes to dispose of cases.

“I’d like to see a program of visiting judges go on indefinitely if there are people willing to help us do that. I just don’t see an end to our backlog.” — Lawrence Buser:

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