Public Defenders Continue To Fight Back Against California's Broken Case Management Software

from the CRIMINAL-JUSTICE-SYSTEM-has-crashed.-Restore-from-backup? dept

In California, the future of criminal case management is now. But the future appears to be broken, and "now" is looking much worse than the recent past. Odyssey is the state's buggy new case management software -- one that's been keeping people from being released, putting people with dismissed charges in jail, and otherwise making the criminal justice system even more horrible than usual. Tyler Technologies, the creator of the software, has called this transition "challenging." (It's also called this rolling cockup a "transition," so…)

Public defenders -- already overworked when things are normal -- are the ones being tasked with sorting out a long stream of erroneous computations and attempting to make things right for the human beings on the receiving end. This is an additional workload public defenders didn't need.

Since [December 2016], the public defender’s office has filed approximately 2,000 motions informing the court that, due to its reportedly imperfect software, many of its clients have been forced to serve unnecessary jail time, be improperly arrested, or even wrongly registered as sex offenders.

The court's response to multiple pleas by public defenders to force someone in the Californian government to clean up this mess? Shit happens. Deal with it.

Although the court recognizes that Odyssey has resulted in unlawful arrests and searches, clerical errors that affect a defendant's Fourth Amendment right to privacy will occur regardless of the case management system used by the court.

Understandably, this non-redress of grievances failed to satisfy public defenders. Cyrus Farivar reports they're headed back to court to appeal the court's do-nothing order.

“These delays and errors violate Government Code § 69844’s express requirement that Superior Court clerks enter judicial orders ‘forthwith,’ as well as the constitutional right to a complete and accurate record on appeal and the Fourth Amendment prohibition upon unlawful arrests and illegal searches,” Charles Denton, an assistant public defender, wrote in his April 10 brief.

The more significant point of the filing [PDF] is this: without pressure from the courts, the problems created (and exacerbated) by the new case management software's rollout will continue to snowball.

For, as we have noted, respondent’s staff concedes that, without a change in software or staffing, it will never be able to “provide a complete and fully accurate record of court proceedings”... The numbers bear this out. The bottleneck in processing commitment orders for the more than 100 state prisoners languishing in county jail is months long, and, seven months after Odyssey’s rollout, there is an ever-growing backlog of more than 12,000 “paperless” files that are missing minute orders, filings, and transcripts.

At this point, being booked in Alameda County is to be forcibly subjected to a malfunctioning criminal justice slot machine. Maybe it will pay off for a few people, but the odds are still on the house. A system that's already largely broken doesn't need assistance from outside vendors' buggy software.

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Filed Under: california, case management, criminal justice, public defenders

Companies: tyler technologies