Solve the crisis in state courts

One thing every American holds dear is his or her freedom. Yet these days, that freedom is under a stealth attack that could destroy it. Our courts protect our freedom and our access to justice when we need it. But at the state court level, the courts are neglected, underfunded and backlogged. The result is a justice system in crisis.

The problem starts with some simple math: How does less than eight-tenths of 1 percent support one third of a whole?

If the answer seems impossible to calculate, we agree: That’s the funding formula for the Georgia judicial system, designed to be a third, co-equal branch of state government.

Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Carol Hunstein’s 2010 State of the Judiciary address offers telling facts. The caseload in Georgia is ballooning: from 2008 to 2010 it climbed 10 percent, amounting to more than a million filings a year.

While the tsunami of cases builds, funding continues to drop. The Georgia bar president reports that the state’s judiciary received a 6 percent budget cut in fiscal year 2011, on the heels of cuts totaling more than 14 percent the two years before.

Gwinnett County’s prosecutor was asked to cut costs by not trying criminal cases for five weeks — nearly 10 percent of the year. As District Attorney Danny Porter said at the time, “Which 9 percent of these victims do you want me to tell, ‘I can’t prosecute your case’?”

Many Georgia courts are increasingly clogged. This newspaper has reported that even urgent and relatively simple matters like child support hearings require months of waiting.

Fee increases are simply shifting problems: Statistics at the end of 2010 showed a sharp spike in magistrate court cases after state court fees were raised dramatically. People need to seek justice somewhere and so they are, in whatever court is affordable and accessible.

Gov. Nathan Deal is rightly asking for fresh new thinking about how the badly strapped state government could re-engineer its criminal justice system, especially with regard to nonviolent drug crimes.

An epidemic of funding crises has hit states large and small, blue and red, north, south, west and east. No one is immune.

Judicial emergencies are in place in many areas so that criminal trial deadlines can be extended. The impact on the civil docket is massive, and it threatens the ability of all Americans to resolve disputes within a justice system designed to be a model for the world.

This year, the American Bar Association has formed a task force that is focused on the backbone of our justice system — our state courts. Superlawyers David Boies and Ted Olson are co-chairs.