The Other Traffic Jam

At Santa Monica High School, an auditorium has been pressed into service this summer as a makeshift courtroom. In the downtown criminal courthouse, jury selection has begun in the “night stalker” case, which threatens to become the most protracted trial in California history. And, before fiscal 1988 is over, a record 1.3 million residents of Los Angeles County--one adult in every four--will find letters in their mailboxes inquiring about their availability for jury service.

What these seemingly unconnected facts point up is that the court system, particularly in Los Angeles County, is deeply troubled, its problems so overwhelming that judges and court administrators, no matter how conscientious or ingenious, cannot solve them on their own. There’s no mystery about the source of these problems: California needs more judges, more courtrooms, more court clerks, more jails--and a new willingness on the part of Californians to pay for all of it.

The stage at Santa Monica High’s Barnum Hall has been transformed into a courtroom to help clear up a huge backlog of civil lawsuits, which on the average take 4.8 years to come to trial. In response to separate lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. complaining of overcrowded jails and congested dockets, the Superior Court has rented temporary courtrooms and brought judges out of retirement.

The “night stalker” murders terrified half of California, and now the trial of the drifter accused of those crimes also threatens to be nightmarish in its burden on the system. Yet in its exaggerated, bigger-than-life fashion the case illustrates the problems of the criminal-justice system--from unnecessary pretrial motions to overly long jury selection. In the trial of a serial-murder suspect it may be barely tolerable for jury selection to take six months, but it is no longer remarkable in a misdemeanor case for jury selection to last longer than the trial itself--and that is not tolerable.

One result of crowded dockets and longer trials is that more potential jurors must be summoned. In the downtown Superior Court each judge on the criminal side carries such a heavy caseload that he may spend up to three hours a day in managing his docket, hearing pretrial matters and sentencing defendants. If he works hard, that leaves about four hours for trial. On that schedule a felony case that might once have taken a week to try can stretch into two weeks or beyond. Few employers will subsidize jury service for longer than two weeks, and few employees can afford to serve without pay, so the county must cast an ever wider net for jurors. The one advantage that we see in being called more frequently for jury service is that it reminds those summoned of what ails the courts.

The Legislature and the governor already know what’s wrong, but funds for trial-court operations and for 106 new judges are blocked by the current budget impasse. The Trial Court Funding Act, providing state funds for the courts operated by the counties, was enacted three years ago, but the counties have yet to see a dime; it took two more years to enact the implementing legislation, and now $370 million for the courts is hung up in the duel between Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature over how to balance the budget.

A bill to fund the trial courts has been joined with a Senate-passed revenue package that would accelerate the collection of some taxes and make California law on corporate taxation conform to federal rules. The package has won the support of a powerful coalition of lobbyists, including the County Supervisors Assn. and the California Chamber of Commerce. But, in the end, it will be Deukmejian who must be won over, and he is resistant to anything that smacks of a tax increase; instead, he wants the Legislature simply to free the $190 million that he set aside in the state reserves for six months’ funding for the courts.

As a former prosecutor, the governor understands the needs of the courts better than others in Sacramento, and, to his credit, he took the lead in creating more judgeships. We would hope that he not only will accept this package, the only measure that would provide all the court funds that the counties are counting on, but also will address the long-term needs of the courts; this bill provides only 14 new Superior Court judgeships for Los Angeles County, for example, not the 84 that the Judicial Council says are essential.

The needs of the judicial system never attract as much attention as the needs of the freeway system, never arouse as much sympathy as uninsured families with sick children. And yet, even with the many competing demands on the state budget, neglecting the courts makes no sense. Everyone pays, indirectly, for inefficient courts--in workdays lost to jury service, in higher litigation costs that are passed on to consumers, in lessened public safety. We would rather pay for efficient courts.