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 court system comes under scrutiny in the media whenever a violent criminal winds up back on the streets or a victim’s family waits years for a case to go to trial and bring them closure.
Citizens lay fault with a broken judicial system, the system lays fault with an indifferent legislature and the government lays fault with voters who do not deem the criminal justice system worthy of higher taxes.
It’s a vicious cycle, and Judge Joe Buckner wants out.
Buckner, who serves as chief district court judge for Orange and Chatham counties, is sick of the blame-shifting. He wants court officials to ask, "What part do we play?" and face their challenges head on, innovating new strategies to deal with the court backlog, rather than lamenting the lack of funding.
“Judges and district attorneys and mainline lawyers need to say, ‘Are we doing the best we can do with the resources we’ve been allocated?” Buckner said.
Not to say the court system doesn’t have some deficits, he explains, but judges have an active responsibility to manage their own courtrooms better before they point the blame somewhere else.
“It’s only when the court officials do exactly what they’re supposed to do, to the absolute best of their ability, do they have any footing to ask for additional help,” Buckner said.
But other court officials have argued that certain demands placed on their offices require more support from the legislature. One example, according to Orange and Chatham County District Attorney Jim Woodall, is the recent passage of an open file discovery law in North Carolina.
The law requires prosecutors to turn over all of the state’s evidence to the defense before a trial begins. Although Woodall said the law is a good thing, it is also a “tremendous burden.”
It takes a great deal of time and effort for district attorney’s offices to comply with the law and the funding the legislature allocated to help them with the process never arrived.
“None of that money, it’s been about three or four years, has made it into a prosecutor’s office yet. Not one penny,” he said.
While Buckner conceded that district attorney’s offices do face challenges with open file discovery, he maintained that district attorneys need to be doing their best with what they’ve got before they ask for more.
In his district, Buckner has initiated several measures to help smooth the judicial process and ease some pressure on thinly stretched court officials. Orange and Chatham counties are one of a handful of districts in the state that has taken certain types of cases off the regular court docket and dealt with them in new and innovative ways.
Instituting a mental health court, traffic court, drug court, custody mediation program and child planning conferences have all helped with court backlog. In mental health and drug-related cases, focusing on those problems specifically has reduced recidivism and therefore, in the long run, will keep case load down, Buckner said.
“We bore our idea out of the fact that these folks were in court anyway,” said Buckner. “So from a court manager’s point of view, from the court personnel’s point of view, it was not new work. It was the same work done in a different way.”
Buckner’s proactive approach to the court system’s problems is something all court officials will have to address once jail capacities are reached, he said.
“Sometimes you have to change your strategy, which seems like more of an effort at first, in order to get a better outcome long-term… You can’t stop the last event in criminal court, but you may be able to prevent the next one,” he said.
