Michigan's second largest court recently regained partial control of its docket after being supervised by Judge Michael Talbot and the Michigan Supreme Court.  The 30-plus judges of the 36th District Court will report their daily attendance to the High Court's administrative office along with progress on their caseloads; the court administrator for the district court in Detroit will continue to provide the Supreme Court Administrative Office with financial reports as well.

The  36th District Court handles one million cases per year according to Fox News Detroit.  The court's own web site, however, proudly touts a docket only half that large.  Perhaps they need to review their own files a little more closely.

Some big-time felony criminal cases get started in the 36th District Court, situated adjacent to Comerica Park and Ford Field in Downtown Detroit.  Many of today's Tiger and Lion fans will walk right past this court on their way to the games.

Some of the court's revenue woes stem from the quarter billion dollars in uncollected traffic tickets and unpaid misdemeanor fines.  Collecting even a fraction of these revenues would go a long way to relieving some of the court's fiscal pressures.

The recently concluded Supreme Court review resulted in the district court significantly trimming its bloated workforce and streamlining its procedures.  These are moves in the right direction.

On one memorable occasion, this Blogger presented with a matter for which the court clerk could not determine the assigned judge, despite reviewing a copy of the notice sent by the clerk to my client.  When the judge was figured-out, I went to the assigned court room at 10:30 am, only to find the doors locked.  Although the lights were on in the court room, and I could see staff in the back, it took another hour to get the matter heard before a judge.

When I left the court around noon that day, I had the feeling that I was lucky to have my matter heard at all.  Hopefully, those days are over.

Pruning redundant staff and streamlining court procedures will help this high-volume court to provide the citizens of Detroit a crucial public service: access to justice and the rule of law.

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The thing about district courts is the funding to make them operate; district courts do not have uniform funding across the state.  Funding for a district court depends on getting money from its political parent (the city or the county, or the state) and from the citizens within the community who get ticketed and brought into the court.

The district courts in Detroit and Pontiac are in financial trouble.  This is because they are self-funded courts, meaning they derive a significant portion of their operating budget from revenue generated from tickets and court costs assessed from the folks that appear in those courts.

In Detroit, the 36th District Court also relies on the City of Detroit's budget.  The current budget year has not been kind to the district court.  It requested a "bare bones" allocation of $36 million but only received $31 million.

More recently, the Michigan Supreme Court, concerned about the district court's fiscal health, appointed Court of Appeals Judge, and former Wayne County Circuit Judge Michael Talbot, as a special administrator of the 36th District Court.

In Pontiac, the Michigan Supreme Court has called for the elimination of two judges at the 50th District Court; also a self-funded court.  While the budget for the Pontiac court has gone up, the court's revenues from tickets and courts costs has eroded.

Both courts have seen administrative staff reductions.  Both courts are being asked by the Supreme Court to do more with less.

Like Detroit, the folks getting fined and assessed court costs in Pontiac just don't have the dough; the folks getting ticketed simply cannot afford to pay the fines, or do not pay the fines.  The courts can assess fines all-day-long, but if the local citizens cannot afford or refuse to pay them, then it amounts to phantom revenue.

Our lawyers are going from the 36th District Court, across the street to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice all the time.  Often, we swing by the 50th in Pontiac on our way Eastside, or up to 1200 N. Telegraph.

So far, we have not noticed a disruption of service with the hard-working employees of those courts.  Let's see what happens as the operating budgets of those courts are brought into line with reality.

In our opinion here at the Law Blogger, while courts must run as efficiently as possible, the cost of justice is not something we can skimp on; the courts must stay open for business no matter what.

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Barbara Hernandez

Barbara Hernandez was convicted in 1991 of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; she was sixteen years old.  The facts adduced at her trial were that she coaxed her victim, a 28-year old auto mechanic, into a vacant crack-house in Pontiac where her boyfriend, or pimp, depending on who you believe, stabbed him 25-times. 

The motive: robbery to obtain funds to fuel said boy friend's raging crack habit. Sympathy rating on scale of one to five; zero.

More than 20-years after her capital conviction, views on the Hernandez case remain polarizing.  For example, in an AP article detailing the murder, the prosecutor that tried Hernandez here in he Oakland County Circuit Court recently reflected on the case she submitted to the jury.

During her years with the Oakland County Prosecutor, Donna Pendergast, now an Assistant Attorney General, tried many high profile murders.  She had this to say about Hernandez:

Contrary to her assertion that she's cowering around the corner under some sort of influence of her boyfriend, quite the contrary. She's right in the mix and the evidence shows that.  At 16 years old, when you're involved with a scheme of that (kind of) deadly ramifications, you know what you're doing.  

On the other hand, one of the now-retired investigators who took a statement from Hernandez soon after the incident, recently claimed that he no longer recalls her saying that she may have held the victim; he told the AP:  "why I testified to that; who knows?"

Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided in Miller v Alabama that mandatory juvenile lifer laws violate the 8th Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, critical aspects on the application of this decision were not addressed by the SCOTUS.  For example, recent cases percolating through the appellate courts here in Michigan address whether SCOTUS' Miller decision should be applied retroactively.

In People v Carp, the Michigan Court of Appeals recently held that the SCOTUS' Eighth Amendment ruling did not apply retroactively.  In doing so, Judge Michael J. Talbot conducted a tour de force of juvenile and capital sentencing jurisprudence, mandating lower courts with pending cases to take a juvenile offender's tender years into account; exhorting the legislature to address this perceived gap in our justice system; but nevertheless refusing to retroactively apply Miller on a collateral review.

Of course, Raymond Carp's attorneys have applied for further appellate review to the Michigan Supreme Court.  The briefs are in, with the Michigan Attorney General having just filed a brief in opposition earlier this month; and [update] an op-ed piece in the Detroit News.

Juvenile lifers recently received a big boost by a decision of United States District Court Judge John O'Meara who ruled that the SCOTUS Miller decision was retroactive for the 350 lifers convicted as juveniles and that prisoners so convicted deserved a chance at parole.

Convicts in Barbara Hernandez's position await the outcome of this decision while their lives burn-down like a candle.  Michigan's oldest juvenile lifer is 68; convicted of murder in 1962.

We here at the Law Blogger have to wonder: do murdering teens deserve a second chance in life?

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