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Cyrus Farivar - Apr 29, 2017 6:00 pm UTC
“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.
Denton largely reprised many of the same arguments that his office made when he appeared before the Superior Court.
As Ars reported in December 2016, the Alameda County Superior Court switched from a decades-old courtroom management software to a much more modern one on August 1, 2016. Known as Odyssey Court Manager, the new management software is made by Tyler Technologies.
However, since then, 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.
As part of his March 2017 ruling, Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson noted that, while a state law mandates that such court records be kept “forthwith,” it does not specify that such records be processed within 24 hours. Instead, the law stipulates that records should be processed within an unspecified “reasonable” time.
Denton, for his part, called this conclusion “largely academic.” In his appellate brief, he continues:
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.
Thomas Counts, a San Francisco-based attorney who is representing the Alameda County Superior Court in this case, did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. The 1st Appellate Division recently granted him an extension to file a reply to Denton’s opening brief by May 12, 2017.
UPDATE Monday 5:03pm ET: Tony Katsulos, a spokesman for Tyler Technologies, sent us an e-mail with a link to the company's February 7 statement, which says, in part: "Tyler is ready, willing and able to provide assistance to the Court on any issues related to this implementation. Since September 2016, Tyler has repeatedly indicated its willingness to provide significant no-cost resources to assist the Court with any implementation issues it faces."
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