Riverside Superior Court ran out of time to try 1,800 criminal cases, and consequently dismissed them. San Bernardino Superior Court has not dismissed any cases for lack of time.
Both counties have too many judge vacancies and insufficient state funding. And San Bernardino Superior Court has a pandemic-caused felony case backlog nearly twice as high as Riverside’s.
It’s not that San Bernardino processed all their cases on time. They determined they had good cause to postpone their deadlines.
California’s Speedy Trial Law, which Riverside Superior cites as the legal cause for their case dismissals, requires criminal trials to be held within 60 days, or later, if a court-defined “good cause to continue,” or postpone, is established.
Riverside Superior Court determined that they did not have the legal footing to grant themselves time extensions, because they concluded their backlog was due largely to decades of insufficient resources. That is not a legal reason to extend trial deadlines.
“(T)he number of cases demanding trial exceeded the court’s resources resulting in cases being dismissed when no courtroom was available and ‘good cause’ as defined under the law did not exist,” the court said in a March 2 news release.
Riverside District Attorney Michael Hestrin has argued that the court should have postponed the cases, because he concludes the backlog has been primarily due to the pandemic. According to precedent, a pandemic that halts court activity is good cause.
San Bernardino Superior would not elaborate on their findings of good cause for continuances, nor would they comment on the discrepancy between the counties’ case dismissal numbers.
HISTORY OF UNDERFUNDING
Although Riverside Superior Court has been underfunded for decades, the court’s first time dismissing a case due to the Speedy Trial Law was in 2007, according to the Daily Journal.
“We always come up right to the edge, and today we finally went over it,” said Riverside Superior Judge Gary Tranbarger in the Journal article.
At the time, the court had 1,000 misdemeanor and felony cases awaiting trial. Twenty-five percent of inmates in county jail were waiting for trial for over a year, with one inmate waiting for trial for four years, according to the Court of Appeal.
The court had 76 judges and 16 commissioners, with 503,000 filings, giving each judge about 6,618 filings – about three times the average California judge’s caseload today (but twice the caseload per Inland Empire judge) – according to the 2008 Judicial Council annual case report. That was the worst ratio in the state.
Riverside Superior Court had 84 judges, and 6,160 filings per judge. Riverside Superior Court had 18,437 felonies filed, compared to San Bernardino’s 19,936.
Judicial Task Force
That year, 28 judges, some retired, came to Riverside County from across the state to help manage the backlog.
A report from that task force said Riverside’s backlog came from a combination of factors, including an increase in criminal case filings and a stagnating number of judges.
While Riverside County’s population grew by more than 76 % from 1989 to 2006, the county received only three new judges, a 6.5% increase, the task force said in the report.
The task force also partially blamed what they called an anti-plea bargaining policy carried out by then-Riverside District Attorney Rod Pacheco for delaying case resolutions.
The report said that San Bernardino had outperformed Riverside in criminal trial numbers, despite having a higher caseload per judge.
The task force report said that the Riverside district attorney did not acknowledge his responsibility to limit the number of criminal cases filed, or the criminal cases taken to trial.
The judicial task force report also named a culture of easy continuances, or decisions to postpone a hearing, as a cause of Riverside’s backlog.
DA v. Court
Hestrin says Riverside Superior hasn’t prioritized case management, that the late trials are due to the pandemic, and that case precedent establishes that the trials should have been postponed instead of dismissed.
Riverside Superior Interim Court Executive Officer Marita Ford says the court is historically underfunded, and that the longtime problem underlay the inability to process cases on time.
Hestrin has filed an appeal over one of the dismissed cases, People v. Tapia (E080076), and requested the Court of Appeal publish an opinion that would establish precedent supporting postponement. A date for oral argument has not been set. A tentative ruling has been issued but not released.
Hestrin sat down with Follow Our Courts to discuss the policies and history behind the court’s backlog. Ford declined the offer to comment for the court, but provided a press release.
“Due to the insufficient number of judicial positions allocated to Riverside County, the Riverside Superior Court has never been able to keep up with the filed caseload. The court has always been challenged with a developing backlog of criminal trials. This backlog was further exacerbated by the slowdown in court proceedings necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic,” the release says.
“While the court expressed its hope not to dismiss any felony cases, the court made clear that our ability to handle the caseload would be entirely dependent upon the actions taken by the district attorney and the defense to resolve cases.”
Disposition rates
Despite the court’s challenges, it managed its cases well after a judicial task force concluded its report in 2008.
Annual dispositions still exceeded case filings until 2014. That year, the court disposed of 15,700 felony cases; also that year 14,200 new cases were filed. The court continued to exceed its case dispositions over filings until 2018, when it fell short by 400 cases, then barely exceeded by 200 in 2019. In 2020, the court disposed of 1,700 cases fewer than were filed.
Riverside Superior Court disposed of 83% of felony filings in 2019, compared to 65% across the state and 77% in Orange County. Orange County, by comparison, has not yet disposed of 200 cases more than were filed in a single year.
San Bernardino’s statistics are missing in the Judicial Council report, but from 2012 to 2015, the last record of dispositions, the county stayed about 2,000 felony dispositions short of reaching par with filings.
Funding changes, also, put Riverside Superior Court approximately on par with other mid-sized courts. Most mid-sized courts were around 85% funded in 2021-22.
Pandemic backlog
Riverside Superior Court had 5,213 felony cases backlogged after the pandemic, according to a February report by the Judicial Council. The court, however, is not the only court that had such a backlog. Riverside Superior Court isn’t even the most backlogged.
Of California’s 58 counties, 47 had some type of felony backlog after the pandemic, 14 had over a thousand, and four had a higher backlog than Riverside. The Judicial Council estimates San Bernardino has 3,000 more felony cases backlogged due to the pandemic than Riverside.
Judges needed
Now, both courts are still short on judges.
San Bernardino Superior Court needs 30 more judges, and Riverside needs 22, according to the latest Judicial Council shortage report.
SPEEDY TRIAL LAW
California’s Speedy Trial Law requires a trial to be held within 60 days of the defendant’s arraignment. Judges, however, can grant exceptions to that rule if they find “good cause” to continue, a legal term defined by California’s appellate courts.
California’s statewide Rules of Court have named the unavailability of an expert witness, attorney or party because of death or illness, as good cause to postpone a trial. The courts have ruled that a backlog caused by the pandemic constitutes good cause.
In the case People v. Engram, the Court of Appeal ruled that delays caused by chronic underfunding of Riverside Superior Court does not constitute good cause to postpone a trial.
“In the present case, as in the prior cases of Cole… arising out of the same general circumstances prevailing in the Riverside Superior Court during the relevant period, the trial court properly could find that the congested criminal caseload represented a chronic condition rather than an exceptional circumstance, and further that the lack of available courtrooms and judges was attributable to the Legislature's failure to provide a number of judges and courtrooms sufficient to meet the rapidly growing population in Riverside County. Under these circumstances, we conclude the trial court in this matter did not abuse its discretion in determining that the unavailability of a judge or courtroom to bring defendant's case to trial within the statutory period was fairly and reasonably attributable to the fault or neglect of the state and accordingly did not constitute good cause to delay the trial under Section 1382.”
Preventive efforts
The release provided by Ford said that the court took many steps to resolve cases during the pandemic, including reopening criminal trial departments in June 2020, before other counties, allowing pleas to be entered through paperwork without a court appearance, using video to allow remote appearances and establishing mandatory settlement conference departments to help pre-trial case resolutions. After the pandemic, the court began sending civil judges to hear criminal trial matters and changed their calendar assignment to call cases multiple times a day to make sure that a new trial is immediately begun as soon as a courtroom is available. The court also redesignated some courtrooms for criminal trials, and assigned new officers to criminal courtrooms. They also reduced new judge training to set their judges in office as soon as possible, and hired retired judges to fill vacancies.
“The court continues to review and adjust its case management processes in response to this crisis, making every effort to get these dismissals stopped,” the release ended.
Riverside Superior Court announced an expansion of their mandatory settlement conferences March 13.
The program will require a settlement conference between prosecutors, defense counsel and defendant for every misdemeanor case prior to trial. It is scheduled to begin April 3, in Indio’s Larson Justice Center.
At the same time, the court announced the opening of another criminal trial department made possible by the appointment of an additional judge.
The court had already established mandatory settlement departments in each region of the county, the release said.
Legal arguments
Legally speaking, the Riverside County District Attorney and Riverside Superior Court disagree on which backlog cause should be considered.
Hestrin and the court have agreed that underfunding and the pandemic have both played a role in the backlog.
Until the Court of Appeal issues their ruling, there is no California precedent that determines good cause at the intersection of chronic underfunding and the pandemic.
YES, PLEAS
Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin said he is reorganizing the DA’s Office to incentivize plea deals. Instead of having one prosecutor handle a case from beginning to end, he is creating a special unit that seeks to dispose of mid- to low-level cases before trial through either plea deals or diversions. Once a case gets to the point where it would be brought to trial, the case would be handed over to a trial prosecutor, Hestrin said.
“You’re basically trying to move a whole bunch of cases before they get to the prosecutor’s desk,” Hestrin said.
“The job of that attorney is to settle cases, to move cases,” Hestrin said.
Hestrin had also started an early disposition program when he took office in 2015, he said. At arraignment, the DA’s Office would offer the lowest plea deal to defendants. The idea was to clear the cases at the earliest possible step. The Office of the Public Defender agreed to the program, but it broke down after two years, Hestrin said, because defense attorneys thought it was not best to plea out their clients so early.
The plea factor
Responding to the Judicial Council report’s claim that the District Attorney’s Office was partially responsible for the backlog in 2007, Hestrin said the task force report was about a different DA, and a different office. He said he has prioritized plea deals.
In the March 2 press release, Ford said, “The ability of a court to manage its caseload is entirely dependent on the outside stakeholders i.e. the District Attorney and the defense negotiating cases in good faith. When the policies and actions of these stakeholders do not function to maintain the necessary level of case resolution pretrial, no court will be able to manage the total number of trials before it, a condition that is further exacerbated for a court that is under-judged.”
Ford said that 95% of felony cases and 92% of misdemeanor cases must be resolved before trial, and that the DA’s plea bargaining practice was partly responsible.
Although Riverside Superior does not reach those numbers, it reportedly outperforms most of the state in plea deals, and underperforms the state in case dismissals. A data line labeled incomplete shows 92% of cases resolved in 2019 were resolved through plea deals in Riverside, in the 2021 Court Statistics Report.
That’s better than the statewide average of 80%. Reported statistics for San Bernardino Superior Court have been spotty, but in 2014, 85% of cases resolved in San Bernardino were resolved through guilty pleas.
Hestrin said defense attorneys now hold out until the day of trial to agree to plea deals, because it is likely that their client’s case will be dismissed anyway when they get to the courtroom. In one day during the case dismissals, 10 defendants took plea deals after a courtroom was found for their trial, Hestrin said.
“As soon as they knew that there was a chance, not a certainty, but a chance that they were going to trial, they were ready to plead,” Hestrin said.
He added that he did not blame defense attorneys for waiting till the last day, because that may be best for their client.
Delays
Hestrin said that the court’s practice of easy postponements, as outlined in the task force report, persisted in Riverside County. Both defense counsel and prosecutors are guilty of asking for continuances, Hestrin said, but judges also grant continuances when people just don’t want to start a trial.
Hestrin said fixing it would be mostly a cultural change. He said Riverside Superior Court can pattern itself after San Bernardino by continuing misdemeanor hearings by filing the paperwork instead of going before a judge.
