Reader Alert: This story is part of NC WANTED’s spotlight on North Carolina’s criminal justice system. As long as concerns exist, we at NC WANTED will point them out and seek wisdom from leaders on the front lines of our legal system.
The ‘Long Arm of the Law’ has been a phrase used in movies, books, even comics to mean that no one can escape the reach of justice.
But as we have learned in the Eve Carson murder case, violent criminals are avoiding our legal system’s grasp.
The problem is not limited to the probation system.
For many weeks, NC WANTED has been looking into allegations that at least 50,000 warrants remain unserved in Durham County and that a similar backlog exists in Wake County as well.
“In Durham County, law enforcement agencies have struggled to serve warrants and subpoenas to ensure a case is heard when it shows up on the docket,” said Chief District Court Judge Elaine Bushfan. The longer it takes a case to be heard in District Court, and the more times the same case shows up on the dockets, the more the problem multiplies.
This past Wednesday, another prominent Durham judge pleaded with one of our staff members to bring cameras and expose the decaying and non-existent technology in Durham’s courtrooms. The judge openly demonstrated how clerks use old-fashioned hand sorting methods to sift through endless court records not yet archived in a modern computer system.
As a result of NC WANTED’s research, our staff has now encountered multiple district attorneys, judges and law enforcement officers willing to speak candidly and echo a common plea for help: Our entire judicial system is in a state of crisis.
“It’s been a crisis, I’ve been telling people for years,” Orange and Chatham County District Attorney Jim Woodall told NC WANTED.
The criminal justice system is "crumbling," he said, because it "has been run on a shoestring for the last 25 or 30 years."
The courts receive less than three percent of the state’s overall budget. Judicial salaries in the state of North Carolina are ranked 51 out of 51 in the nation, Judge Joe Buckner confirmed to NC WANTED. Judge Buckner serves as president of the North Carolina Association of District Court Judges.
According to Jim Woodall, this underfunding makes it increasingly difficult for district attorney’s offices, public defender’s offices and district courts to attract and maintain a full staff.
"I have a case now, which is a major case, and I've had three different prosecutors assigned to it because in my office, I've lost prosectors," Woodall added. "I lost one prosecutor to a job in the private sector paying her almost twice what i could pay her. I lost one prosecutor to the U.S. Attorney's Office, paying more and with better benefits than I can provide."
When staff members are stretched too thin, errors happen. A recent example involves the probation case of Demario James Atwater, one of the accused killers of UNC student Eve Carson. Records reveal that the clerk assigned to Atwater’s probation hearing sent him to the wrong courtroom, which allowed Atwater to walk away from possible jail time two days before he allegedly gunned down 22-year-old Carson.
Staffing shortages, coupled with population and crime rate growth in the Triangle, have created a crippling backlog of the court system.
“I don’t know that there are more arrests as percentage of the population, but just as everything grows, arrests grow and the court resources just haven’t kept pace,” said Bryan Collins, public defender for Wake County. He is concerned that defendants’ right to a speedy trial may be impeded by administrative inadequacies.
“Any shortcoming or shortfall in the system sort of has a ripple effect throughout the whole system. A criminal case is much like a pipeline and if it gets clogged at any point, it backs up all the way down,” Collins explained.
The state legislature recently gave districts courts the ability to handle felony cases without passing them up to Superior Court, but Bushfan said that goal is unrealistic.
“We don’t have enough resources to be able to accommodate that because we are just trying to… get our nose above water and be able to breathe without trying something new because we are basically floundering trying to handle the caseload we already have,” she said.
Woodall said the legislature has been very responsive to criminal justice problems in the last few years, in sharp contrast to three or four years ago. But a history of giving the criminal justice system minimal priority is creating problems that may continue long into the future.
“Everyone acknowledges that the technologies are 10 to 15 years behind, staffing is probably behind by 25 percent, salaries are behind, there aren’t enough courtrooms, there aren’t enough judges, there aren’t enough bailiffs, there aren’t enough clerks, there aren’t enough prosecutors,” Woodall explained.
“And so, at some point, we have to decide as a state, is a criminal justice system important? Is it something that needs priority?”
