Hearing in a kitchen
Lehigh and Northampton judges were already using video and phone conferencing to hear emergency matters. More preliminary hearings for incarcerated defendants moved to Zoom last week in Lehigh County. Northampton County uses Polycom video conferencing.
Though the venue was broken into parts — a defense lawyer’s home office, a white-painted cinder blocked holding cell at the Lehigh County jail, Courtroom 1C on the first floor of the courthouse, a conference room in the district attorney’s office and a state trooper’s kitchen — a preliminary hearing The Morning Call observed via Zoom last week was conducted just like a prepandemic proceeding.
Except that when the lone prosecution witness, a woman wearing a pink face mask in the courtroom, testified, it was difficult to understand her words. District Justice Ronald S. Manescu, hearing the case from a remote office, asked her to lean closer to the microphone.
That hearing went smoothly, ending with the defendant being held for trial. Other hearings last week were continued because witnesses were not available.
Though that’s a common occurrence even when courts are operating normally, each delay during the pandemic compounds a backlog that’s been building up for nearly two months, said defense attorney Paul Missan. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but I do worry about my clients who are in jail with this virus going around. You don’t want a healthy young kid who’s a shoplifter getting a death sentence,” he said.
Both state and local judicial emergency orders handed down since the pandemic have prioritized hearings that could result in an incarcerated person being released. Other time-sensitive matters, such as arraignments, search warrant requests and juvenile detention hearings, have also continued despite the court slowdown.
Virtual criminal hearings could be affected by individual police departments’ policies. Allentown police officers, for example, must attend preliminary hearings in person, at the courthouse, and not via Zoom, Chief Glenn Granitz Jr. confirmed.
Missan, who began his career as a prosecutor in the Bronx, one of the first district attorney’s offices in the nation to embrace video to record suspect interviews, said he’s glad to see technology being used during the pandemic. Especially since he has a pregnant wife to worry about. “The virus is everywhere. So I’m not going anywhere near the courthouse,” he said.