The slow re-opening of the state means different things to different people. For some it’s back to lunches and shopping, but in the state’s court system, where delays are already baked into the process, empty courtrooms and locked down courthouses make it look like justice has slowed to a crawl, although Judge Glenn Grant, who runs the state’s courts, says justice is not taking off during the quarantine. “Today we have had about 35,000 proceedings involving approximately 320,000 petitions and those have been bench trials, discovery motions, adoptions, drug court graduations, all kinds of proceedings. The things that we have not been able to do is bring large gatherings of people such as juries, juris assembly and trials.”
And that’s no small thing when you’re sitting in county, waiting for your day in court. Jennifer Sellitti is with the public defender’s office, “thankfully in New Jersey in 2017 we adopted pre-trial justice reform. I always shudder to think about how many people would be waiting for trial in our county jails had we not done that. So were already ahead of the game a little bit there but there are still people who have been put on hold, their cases are on hold. They’re sitting in detention and they have been on hold since March, so those trials will be a priority.”
But the courts are in Phase one of a four-phase reopening that moves to phase two on Monday, wherein 10-15 percent of the system’s staff will be back – with limited on-site activity. Anything involving a jury where even half the court staff is on hand? That’s for phase three and beyond. Those dates have still to be set. And that’s bad news for defendants.
Alex Shalom, Senior Supervising Attorney, ACLU-NJ, said, “the Speedy trial law that we have in place right now generally provides 90 days to inict a person and 180 days within which to try them after that, so 270 days from arrest to trial, but that is subject to excludable time and I think that in most cases, you see period of incarceration that are closer to a year or year and a half before a person gets to trial. That’s in ordinary times.”
But this is an extraordinary thing and so what we have now is a situation where the soonest people are getting trials is gonna be after say a year of incarceration and you’re gonna have many people looking at two and even three years.
One of the lessons from the pandemic that many of the people in the court system – prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges – seem to agree on is that fewer people incarcerated makes for fewer traffic jams in the system – and further reforms in that part of the system, are still needed.
