880 Fulton inmates still await trial a year later

Jonathon Robinson is charged with raping three women, but he has sat in the Fulton County jail for four years without a trial at an estimated cost to local taxpayers of more than $100,000.

Robinson may be one of the worst cases of justice delayed but it is far from an isolated one. The Fulton county jail currently has a backlog of about 880 prisoners who have been awaiting trial — most for felonies like murder, rape or armed robbery — for more than a year, according to county figures.

Chief Jailer Riley Taylor, who says it costs about $70 a day to house a prisoner, says that means the county is paying more than $22.5 million in the course of a year to feed, clothe and guard prisoners who should be the state’s responsibility.

“That is assuming the $70 is not a low figure, which it may well be,” Taylor said. “It costs us a lot more to care for an inmate than it does for a prison. They have more rights in jail because they haven’t been convicted.”

There are a number of contributing factors: The case backlog is blamed on various reasons: a fragmented and largely unaccountable court system, lack of state funding for enough judges, wily defense lawyers, mandatory sentencing that makes it difficult to plea bargain and the failure of Superior Court judges to manage their dockets and set cases for trial.

Robinson’s case touches on most of those factors. Last May, Robinson asked the Georgia Court of Appeals to void his indictments on the grounds his constitutional rights have been violated for lack of a speedy trial. No ruling has yet been handed down.

“He has been failed by the court system, the prosecutors and his defense lawyers,” said his former lawyer Scott Dawkins. “He was in front of a judge … who didn’t move cases very well. He kept getting bounced from attorney to attorney and the prosecutors kept switching.”

The Superior Court has been taking steps to address the backlog to eliminate jail overcrowding and develop a more efficient court system. It’s a tall order in a system in which the 19 judges are independently elected with little accountability, answerable only to voters. They generally run unopposed.

Chief Judge Dee Downs says that courts can move cases if judges are disciplined enough to set a realistic trial calendar and stick to it. She noted that defendants don’t accept plea bargains that demand serious jail time until faced with the reality of a trial.

Three years ago the court developed a plan to hear drug and property crime cases — such as auto theft and burglary — by getting specific judges to handle them all, and established strict case management standards in which the defendant has a certain trial date within a few months of arrest. Those cases now are resolved within nine weeks of the arrest, which helped reduce the total backlog from 10,000 to 6,000, Downs said.

District Attorney Paul Howard helped move the cases by having a prosecutor handle each case from indictment to trial — rather than dividing those tasks up among his staff, the judge said.

“The problem before was the larger cases got put in front of the smaller felony cases so they just sat around and gathered dust,” she said. “That is not happening any more.”

The Superior Court is trying to implement uniform court standards for all its judges, which would help move cases involving serious felonies — assuming they agree to the standards. But Downs noted many defendants have little incentive to accept a plea because Georgia law mandates life imprisonment if a person commits a second serious felony such as armed robbery.

If the district attorney doesn’t agree to downgrade the robbery to a lesser offense, it will usually mean a trial. That means even if all judges — three of whom are assigned to divorce court — would have a criminal trial a week, it would take almost a year to handle all cases already a year old.

Such a trial schedule would be an impossibility even for an efficient court system, much less in Fulton, where some judges don’t conduct a trial a month. It would also leave no time for divorce or civil cases and little time for working out pleas and handling pretrial motions — which in all likelihood would mean a backlog.

Court officials say even if all judges adopt a tough court management system, the Superior Court will still need more judges to handle the volume of serious cases that comes its way each year.

The Legislature this year agreed to fund a 20th judge for Fulton but it also has eliminated funding for retired judges who helped conduct trials when other judges were booked. The Superior Court has applied for a $1.2 million federal grant to fund two more judges, their staffs, three more public defenders, two more prosecutors and three investigators to address the backlog of serious felonies.

“The blame lies across the board but it also lies with a shortage of manpower and staffing,” Downs said. “Good case management practice with standards in place and a sufficient number of judges, prosecutors and public defenders will resolve any backlog.”

Taylor, the chief jailer, would welcome any improvement. He remembers having a prisoner in jail on a murder charge for seven years. The prisoner eventually hung himself in his cell, Taylor said.

“We feed a guy for seven years only to have to carry him out on a stretcher,” he said. “I can’t imagine waiting for a trial that long. … You have to wonder if he had a faster trial, would it have turned out the same.”