As COVID Court Backlog Grows, Older Cases Get Dismissed
The pandemic forced large parts of the criminal justice system to slow to a crawl, while a mounting backlog has forced some district attorneys to focus on the most violent offenders — and delay or dismiss other cases.
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The pandemic forced large parts of the criminal justice system to slow to a crawl, while a mounting backlog has forced some district attorneys to focus on the most violent offenders — and delay or dismiss other cases, Axios reports.
The current case backlog is already astronomically large; and in many jurisdictions around the country, prosecutors can’t keep up with the mix of old and new cases.
According to the FBI figures released on Monday, violent crime in the U.S. experienced a record increase in 2020, “the highest single-year spike in U.S. murders in at least six decades.”
But although the first seven months of 2021 has slowed the increase, the backlog has continued.
For example, in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, there are more than 94,000 pending criminal cases. The overflowing stack of new and old unresolved cases will take judges a year or more to clear the dockets, the Houston Chronicle reports, leaving many people to sit in jail and wait — or to have their case dismissed altogether.
Prosecutors in Chicago are taking the dismissal approach, quickly pleading out or dismissing cases to help shrink the courts’ backlog.
Similar reports have come from cities like Oakland, CA and states like North Carolina.
Even then, many worry that these efforts are not enough.
“Without a substantial change, we are facing the very real possibility that it could take more than three years before some violent crimes make their way to trial and even longer for homicide cases,” Spencer Merriweather, the DA in Mecklenburg County, NC said earlier this year, as quoted by Axios.
Merriweather and his team stopped prosecuting low-level drug offenses in February of this year to focus on homicides and violent crimes. As of this summer, their team of 85 prosecutors had 110 murder cases awaiting trial — following the city’s deadliest year on record.
State legislatures and local county governments are considering a variety of proposals, Axios details, from decriminalization to hiring more prosecutors.
