Supreme court official shows extent of court's dysfunction

Nineteen months after the word dysfunctional was used to describe Mahoning County's criminal justice system, the manager of the Ohio Supreme Court's Case Management System has detailed the common pleas court's contribution to this dysfunction.
The 16-page report -- with seven appendixes -- from Atty. Stephanie E. Hess paints an unflattering picture of the operation of the five-judge general division of the court.
For instance, Hess uses the term "cattle call" to describe the practice of scheduling multiple cases for potential trial in the same courtroom, at the same date and time.
That's the very phrase used by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer several years ago to describe the way Youngstown Municipal Court judges operated on trial day. The hallway would be jammed with defendants, family members and friends, turning the courtroom area into a veritable legal zoo.
Moyer and his staff made several recommendations on how the municipal judges could clean up their act. Long-time observers of the court now attest to the marked change in the way business is conducted.
In her "Caseflow Management and Operational Review" of the common pleas court's general division, Atty. Hess spotlighted numerous problems and made recommendations for dealing with them.
The evaluation, which took a year to complete and was conducted at no cost to Mahoning County, was requested by the Mahoning County Criminal Justice Working Group. The group, consisting of county officials, was formed after a federal judge began to oversee the operation of the county jail, which inmates claimed in a lawsuit violated their constitutional rights because of overcrowding.
Case backlog
Hess' recommendations, if followed, would ease the huge case backlog in the common pleas court, and that would have the effect of alleviating the jail population explosion.
While there is a lot in the report for the judges and other court employees to consider, we were struck by this sentence:
"The review and the caseflow management standards referred to throughout the review are derived from the Trial Court Performance Standards, which were developed by the National Center for State Courts in 1987. The TCPS provide courts across the nation with a resource for enhancing their ability to provide fair and efficient adjudication and disposition of cases. The TCPS is a tool for court self-assessment and improvement."
Hess also made reference to CourTools, a set of 10 trial court performance measures that offers court managers a balanced perspective on court operations.
If the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court has been utilizing TCPS and CourTools, we wonder why it is still plagued by so many problems.
On the other hand, if the court isn't utilizing the operational and management guides, we believe the judges owe it to the taxpayers to explain their rationale for not doing what seems to be a no-brainer.
Atty. Hess' analysis of the court comes on the heels of the independent study of Mahoning County's criminal justice system by Atty. Vincent Nathan of Toledo who used the word dysfunctional to describe it. Nathan was appointed by U.S. District Court Judge David D. Dowd Jr. to conduct the study of the system.