In Olmsted County, retired judges attack backlog

Before new system, trial scheduling delays once ranged from 15 to 17 months

By Matt Russell
Post-Bulletin

ROCHESTER, Minn. (AP) — On a recent Wednesday morning in Olmsted County District Court, a retired judge from Rice County presided, stern-faced, over a series of low-level cases.

One woman confessed to stealing $85 worth of alcohol, and another defendant admitted he punched someone in the face. Toward the end of the three-hour slate of hearings, a 22-year-old man pleaded guilty to helping a friend steal a stick of deodorant.

Just last year, Olmsted County District Court had the worst backlog of cases in the state. Trial scheduling delays have been slashed over the past nine months, however, under a new system in which a retired judge arrives in Rochester every four weeks to resolve cases that would otherwise clog the system, the Post-Bulletin reports.

“There has been a dramatic drop,” said Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem. “The end result has been what we were looking for — a court calendar that is relatively timely.”

Trial scheduling delays once ranged from 15 to 17 months. Ostrem spoke about them frequently, saying witnesses became harder to locate and some defendants committed new offenses while awaiting trial.

Now trial dates are getting scheduled in around three months for misdemeanors and four months for felonies, according to Assistant City Attorney Michael Spindler-Krage.

The use of retired judges is a stopgap solution, however, with funding guaranteed only through June 2013.

“It’s a good Band-Aid,” court administrator Chuck Kjos said, “but it’s a Band-Aid.”

Felony and misdemeanor cases have competed for courtroom time in Olmsted County District Court in the past, leading to delays as schedules clogged with hearings.

Approximately 99 percent of misdemeanor cases settle before going to trial, according to Kjos. Trial dates still need to be put on calendars for those cases, however, because defendants often don’t plead guilty until a jury trial is imminent.

“It’s that lateness is really what clogs it up when you mix them all (misdemeanor and felony cases) together,” Kjos said.

Case backlogs started shrinking in December when retired judges started coming to Rochester for trial calendars dedicated solely to gross misdemeanor and misdemeanor cases. All cases on the calendars are ready to go to trial, with a jury on standby.

Settlements were reached and trials avoided in most cases since December. On the Wednesday morning earlier this month, for example, many cases took 10 minutes or less. None of the 15 people with cases on retired Judge Gerald Wolf’s court calendar that morning went to trial, although there were a few no-shows.

“They (defendants) are much more ripe to settle because your witnesses are still available, and they have a good memory of what happened,” Kjos said.
The pendulum might have swung too far since December toward speedy scheduling, with public defenders getting less time to meet with defendants, said Managing Attorney Chris Anderson of the 3rd Judicial District Public Defender’s Office.

“We’re not facilitators of guilty pleas — we’re also defending people,” Anderson said.

Kjos said the goal of the new system isn’t to rush defendants into bad pleas.

A fundamental cause of delays, Ostrem said, is that Olmsted County District Court has long needed a seventh full-time judge.

A bill to fund that position failed to pass despite bipartisan sponsorship this year from Rochester’s legislative delegation.

DFL Rep. Kim Norton, a bill sponsor, said she would sponsor similar legislation again if re-elected. The bill wouldn’t specifically say the judge is for Olmsted County, she said, but Olmsted County is first on the waiting list statewide.

Olmsted County has a documented need for a seventh judge, said Republican Sen. Carla Nelson, who sponsored legislation this year to fund another judge and also is running for re-election. A needs analysis must be done, Nelson said, and factors such as population should be considered when deciding how many judges a courthouse gets.

The county learned last June it would receive funding for retired judges through June 2013, leading to a months-long process that brought together typical adversaries in the court system — prosecutors and defense attorneys — to lay the groundwork for the new misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor calendar.
“It’s not all that often that all of us get together and have agreement on such a major initiative,” Ostrem said.

Some backsliding will happen if a seventh judge isn’t hired and Olmsted County loses money for retired judges, but the recent collaboration should be a model for cutting backlogs in the future, Spindler-Krage said.

“I would be fighting to make sure that we don’t end up in the horrendous place where we were previously,” he said.