Amid ongoing talks about how South Carolina elects its judges, some state officials have resurfaced concerns over the number of criminal cases resting on court dockets for more than a year without a resolution in sight. As a result, beyond issues of delayed justice and overcrowded jails across the state — as indigent criminal defendants often spend years in jail waiting for their day in court — the snarl of cases has created increasingly heavy caseloads for solicitors and public defenders.
To aid the crisis, however, the Legislature last year granted solicitors and public defenders the most funding ever to hire additional staff. And the South Carolina Supreme Court last summer issued, for the first time, a concise docket order, providing solicitors, defense attorneys and judges specific instructions on how to manage the criminal court docket.
1st Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe regards those moves as a “game changer,” and predicts the state will see a significant decline in backlogged cases by the end of this year.
“Even though we have been doing a good job of getting backlogged cases down, we’re still at close to catastrophic levels on cases that are over 545 days old,” Pascoe said. “Now, I believe we’re going to get it down much much more because of Chief Justice Beatty’s order and the funding provided by the House.”
Magnitude of the Backlog
As of Nov. 30, 2023, South Carolina had a total of 175,167 criminal cases pending, according to data from S.C. Court Administration, which considers cases more than 365 days old as backlogged. Of the total number of cases, 81,854 are more than a year old, while 56,077 have been stale for more than 545 days, or a year and a half.
According to a Court Administration benchmark, which is tracked by judicial circuits and counties throughout the state, court officers are encouraged to keep pending cases a year old or less at at least 80 percent. Of the state’s 16 judicial circuits, only one — the 10th Circuit, which encompasses Anderson and Oconee Counties — has successfully met that standard. Besides the 10th Circuit, one other county, McCormick, in the 11th Circuit, has met the state’s benchmark.
The remaining 15 judicial circuits and 43 counties fall short, with the worst being the 13th, 3rd and 6th Judicial Circuits with 64 percent, 59 percent and 58 percent of its pending cases being more than 365 days old, respectively.
But Lisa Catalanotto, executive director of the South Carolina Commission on Prosecution Coordination, says those numbers aren’t fully revealing as other factors may keep a case on a court’s docket even though it has essentially been resolved.
“There are some issues when you look at the number of pending cases that might not necessarily be quite as bad as you think because there are so many diversion programs in all of the 16 circuits,” Catalanotto said. “Those (diversion) cases are not fully disposed of for purposes of reporting until after that participant has completed the program, but there’s nothing left to be done on a prosecution standpoint. Still, they remain on the docket.”
Cause and Contributing Factors to the Backlog
Solicitors and public defenders both attribute a lack of resources as the underlying cause to the criminal case backlog. Other factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and an increased number of arrests have also, they say, played a role in the logjam.
Notwithstanding a problem in retaining prosecutors and public defenders in South Carolina, Catalanotto said recruiting lawyers to public service has been a fundamental snag toward the alleviating the backlog.
“We all need the resources available in order to make the system work,” Catalanotto said. “And one of the biggest issues recently has been the pay of public defenders and prosecutors in public service. The pay for those attorneys historically have been significantly less than those same attorneys could earn in the private sector.”
Like Catalanotto, her counterpart, Hugh Ryan, who serves as executive director of the South Carolina Commission of Indigent Defense, attributed the logjam to a growing inability to retain and recruit pubic defenders.
“The biggest issue now is just finding people to hire,” Ryan said. “It’s a difficult job market to find attorneys, so we need to focus on increasing our workforce.”
Another contributing factor to the backlog, Catalanotto said, involves South Carolina’s growing population, which, in effect, has led to increased rates of crime.
Since 2020, more than 250 thousand people relocated to the Palmetto State, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“As we have a lot more people coming into South Carolina, we have a lot more crime,” Catalanotto said. “The number of warrants and arrests that that are made, are significantly higher now than they were 10 years ago. And it’s a good bit higher in 2023 than 2022. So, that has been another factor with the increasing backlog of cases.”
But private defense attorney and state Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, said the problem has more to do with the evolution of technology.
“We simply have to change the way that we look at things,” Rutherford said. “When I first started my career (as a solicitor) 20 years ago, I could try a DUI case in a day. Now, that police officer has a body cam that you have to watch. He has a dashcam that you have to watch. And if any other officer came on the scene, that same officer has a body cam and a dashcam you have to watch. So you went from having a DUI case that you could try in a morning to a DUI case that’s going to take you a full day just to review the evidence to decide whether you need to move forward or not.”
And while some may regard COVID as the most flagrant cause to the backlog, Pascoe, who became the 1st Circuit’s solicitor in 2005, said criminal cases began piling up in 2016, before the start of the pandemic.
It all started, according to Pascoe, with a state Supreme Court decision that reformed who controls when cases comes before the court.
Historically, solicitors had exclusive control over the court’s calendar, or criminal docket, deciding when a defendant appears before the court along with the judge who presides over the case.
That, however, changed in 2012, when K.C. Langford III complained to the state’s high court for not having received a speedy trial following a conviction of armed robbery, burglary and kidnapping.
The court found it unconstitutional to allow circuit solicitors to rule the docket, and said that function primarily belongs to the courts. As a result, a whirlwind of confusion ensued as to how to manage the court’s criminal docket, ultimately contributing to the current backlog of cases.
Following Langford, “We didn’t have a docketing order on how to run the criminal docket, and it left the courts, solicitors and defense attorneys a little bit in limbo,” Pascoe said. “From that point in 2016 to 2023, we began bringing in more cases than we were moving.”
Efforts to Address the Problem
Last year, both the South Carolina House and Supreme Court took measures seeking to fix the state’s criminal case backlog crisis.
For the first time, the House granted solicitors and public defenders $25.7 million dollars collectively to aid in recruiting and retaining staff. Prosecutors got $14.5 million while public defenders received $11.2 million.
Pascoe said the funding increase allowed him to immediately hire five new assistant solicitors, which has helped his office to make significant strides toward clearing cases in the 1st Circuit.
“Going into the month of November (2023), we have already set a record in the number of cases we’ve cleared in the 1st Circuit, thanks to the additional funding by the Legislature,” Pascoe said.
The Supreme Court issued a docket order last summer, providing specific instructions to solicitors, judges and defense attorneys on how to manage the criminal docket.
Catalanotto and Ryan both agree with Pascoe, that in light of the extra funding by the House and the Supreme Court’s docketing order, major strides toward reducing the criminal case backlog are underway.
“Unless there is another significant spike in the number of arrests that are made and new warrants coming into the office, those two things together are going to be a tremendous, help,” Catalanotto said.
©2024 The State. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
