Grant County civil cases delayed, too many trials

EPHRATA — Grant County Judge Evan Sperline wants a solution to the courts being tied up with criminal trials.

In a letter to the Grant County Bar Association, Sperline said the demand for criminal trials has meant the court needs to use its civil department to meet the need. The delays to civil cases creates a burden on people filing the lawsuits.

“It’s expensive and it damages the interests of justice for those people involved,” Sperline said. “For purposes of campaign claims my letter got turned into a sort of positive, when the letter was intended to show the burden (the delays were) creating on civil litigants.”

The court already has a 12- to 15-month wait time to hold a civil trial.

“The first week that we had to have a criminal trial in the civil department, there was a already a scheduled civil trial that had been scheduled for a year,” Sperline said. “The next time they will be able to have a trial will be in 2012.”

Sperline notes the number of criminal trials in 2010 is getting close to doubling the number of trials in 2009, with the 45th criminal trial being held in the first week of November. The court dealt with 27 trials in 2009, which was 11 more trials than 2008.

Traditionally, about two cases per week were ready for trial and the rest would be resolved with plea agreements, Sperline said. Recently the number has risen to 12 to 14 cases ready to go to trial. State law sets a deadline for criminal cases of 60 days for someone in custody and 90 days for someone not in custody. Delays can push the outside date for a trial back by 30 days.

“If they say to the judge we’re ready to go to trial their deadline doesn’t change and we got pressed into a situation where we had a whole bunch of cases saying, ‘We’re ready to go to trial,’” Sperline said. “That has really turned up the pressure on the criminal trial function of the court.”

Sperline said he wasn’t able to answer exactly why there is an increase in trials, but part of it may be less people are pleading guilty.

“What we can say is there are going to be somewhere around 700 cases filed this year. We couldn’t try more than 100 of them. It’s absolutely necessary to have plea bargains; otherwise we’re going to have to build two or three more courthouses,” he said.

Since sending out the letter asking for solutions, Sperline hasn’t received any response, he said.

Prosecutor Angus Lee pinned the increase in criminal trials on two factors. The first is a policy change requiring deputy prosecutors to obtain felony convictions when filing charges in superior court.

“If a deputy prosecutor wants to change the charge to a misdemeanor, they have to request approval for that in writing,” he said. “If we’re going to charge for a misdemeanor, the best place is in district court ... The only time you want to file a case in superior court is when you’re looking at obtaining a felony convictions.”

Lee said the other reason for the increase in criminal trials is there is more funding for public defense than criminal prosecution.

“When you put those two factors together in cases where the sentencing guidelines has such a narrow range,” he said. “For example, the range will be 12 to 14 months. In that case, the range is so narrow and small ... that the defendant with able defense counsel will go to trial because the worst-case scenario is 14 months.”

The prosecutor is proud his attorneys are taking more cases to trial and getting trial convictions, saying it sends a message to other defendants that Lee is willing to go to trial.

“Trial is a dangerous proposition,” he said. “They’re more willing and likely to plead guilty that way.”

Ray Gonzales, the public defender’s department supervisor, said the prosecutor’s and his budget can’t really be compared since there are differences between what the two departments do.

“We have to pay for investigators, but they don’t since they have the police, but they have a whole civil department and we don’t,” he said. “They have a significantly higher number of attorneys. It’s really, really difficult to draw a parallel.”

The public defenders were also recently lauded by the monitor of the best settlement. In his quarterly report on Grant County public defense, Francisco Rodriguez pointed out the attorneys participated in nine trials in the third quarter of 2010 to “great success.”

Rodriguez pointed to a hung jury in a sex case, not-guilty verdicts on burglary and malicious mischief charges in another case. In two burglary cases, people were convicted of lesser charges, and there were two other acquittals.

Gonzales pointed out the decision to go to trial is always in the hands of the defendant and verdicts are up to juries.

“We have enjoyed some success lately,” he said. “One of the things that has happened is because of our relative success more defendants are choosing to go to trial.”