Courtroom Calendars Are Serious Fucking Business

As mentioned elsewhere, I am a public defender during the day. One thing that stood out to me about the killing of Daunte Wright is that the sole basis for the police stop was because he had a bench warrant for missing Zoom court. Reason Magazine's position is to blame overcriminalization, and I'm inclined to agree.

Courts are Serious Business, and judges rely on the power of the bench warrant to ensure compliance and respect for authority. You can miss appointments with whoever you want, but if you miss court dates you will have a quest marker taped on your head for any guy given a gun and a badge by the government to haul your ass into jail. Sometimes bench warrants are issued for unpaid fines but this is relatively rare and disfavored. In criminal proceedings for example, a defendant really only needs to be present for trial, plea, and sentencing. The rest can be handled by their attorney. Yet, about 80-90% of my court time was wasted on calendar hearings where I'd have to sit there for hours a time with my client waiting for our turn to ask for another court date. I didn't mind too much because I was getting paid, but my clients had to take the morning/afternoon/day off and travel to court for what is the epitome of "this meeting could have been an email".

There are some positive developments in this realm. Maybe the pandemic was the catalyst, but Washington state for example has recently changed its rules to only require the presence of a defendant when a judge explicitly finds "good cause". The rest of the time, things are handled by the attorney. Often by email.

So that's one potential policy change that can be adopted. I have trouble imagining an argument against it. The way bench warrants are executed can also stand to be modified. With a warrant, law enforcement officers are commanded by the court to arrest anyone with a warrant upon contact (there are some very narrow exceptions, usually dealing with jurisdiction issues).

The issue I have is how non-discriminatory it is. If someone has a warrant, they get arrested, no matter how unimportant the underlying charge is. I've seen Murder 2nd warrants for unpaid fines, and shoplifting warrants from 12 years ago because someone didn't file proof of a dumb "consumer awareness class" they were supposed to take. It doesn't matter, they all get arrested and booked, and have to spend at least a few days in jail. Judges are supposedly the safety valve in this system, because they have discretion over how much to set the warrant to. While that serves as a subtle hint to law enforcement of how important it is, it still results in an arrest. It's a very blunt enforcement tool.

Another thing to mention is just how outdated a lot of court records systems are. It took a really long time in the 80s and 90s for courts to adopt computers, and each jurisdiction did it their own way. And they were right to take the cautious and slow approach because fucking up court records can bring a world of hurt. You just do not want to lose people's felony records, or to somehow accidentally create new ones. That's a mess that would result in "everyone at the top resign now" scandal and take years and years to untangle and millions of dollars in both direct costs and legal settlements.

But the downside is that court databases notoriously feel cobbled together with figurative duct tape. When someone shows up in court, you can't expect law enforcement to collect every single case file from every single jurisdiction. Instead, things get translated into a database which collates all that information into a single screen.

So to take the specific Murder 2nd example, the charge was real, it just happened decades ago under a legacy court record system. He was in court now for a banal misdemeanor. Nowadays, state law prohibits issuing warrants for unpaid fines. But the system didn't have a computer designation for just unpaid fines. Instead, 'deficiency' of any kind was lumped in together under the flag 'failure to appear', and an FTA automatically (and maybe reasonably) would get translated by another database into 'active warrant'. So when the judge opened this guy's records all they saw was this bright red 'A' under the warrant column next to murder charges for 'active warrant'. The judge quickly and stealthily called a deputy into the courtroom before realizing it was for him missing a single payment in his court fine payment plan.

Someone with a failure to appear to pending murder charges probably should be arrested, but do all pending charges require an immediate arrest and jail booking? Probably not. Courts will pushback on this because it will give people an excuse to ignore the judicial system's authority. But if you show up at the tail end of any preliminary hearing calendar, you'll see how casually judges issue bench warrants while barely looking at the circumstances. Perhaps an increased reliance on re-summons instead of arrests for low-level crimes would be advantageous to all.

Further, it would probably be helpful for a lot less things to be a crime. Eric Garner was contacted by police on suspicion that he was selling untaxed loose cigarettes. Does evading cigarette taxes really need to be enforced by people with guns? Probably not. But it's probably a good idea to keep in mind that all laws with criminal penalties are enforced by people with guns with a relaxed license to kill (CW: Nathan Robinson article). At least under the current legal system in the US, a good rubric to determine whether there should be a law against something is whether the odd death during the course of its enforcement would be warranted. I gather that a significant majority of laws would fail to pass that test.

This also dovetails on my post last week regarding the issues with relying on law enforcement to deal with traffic violations. There are some driving violations (e.g. DUI, reckless driving, stolen vehicle, etc.) which potentially do require a guy with a gun to enforce, but almost everything else can be handled by a civil corps of traffic enforcers using cameras. I can't think of many arguments against this, at least compared to the status quo.

TL;DR: too many social ill are enforced by dudes with guns equipped with a legal license to kill.